


Lazarus Stone - The 'I' in 'Die'

by ThisBeautifulDrowning



Series: The Lazarus Stone Arc [3]
Category: Weiß Kreuz
Genre: Bloodplay, M/M, Mysticism, Slash, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-04
Updated: 2014-02-04
Packaged: 2018-01-11 03:45:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 44,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1168284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisBeautifulDrowning/pseuds/ThisBeautifulDrowning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The third installment of the Lazarus Stone Arc: wrapping it all up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lazarus Stone - The 'I' in 'Die'

 

**The Lazarus Stone - Book Three**

 

**The ‘I’ in ‘Die’**

 

 

_There is a sickening irony in the fact that things we love the most are the things we will either hurt or kill in the end. There is no way around it - we hold them dear, be they with a living heart or without, and because they are so dear to us we will want to take care of them most of all. Ultimately, we fuck up. We push them away to keep them safe. We kill them because we don’t want anyone else to have them._

 

_It is the way of the world._

 

_We are only human. We are bound to fail._

 

*********

**January 25 th, 2002, Tokyo**

**1934 Hours**

*********

 

There was a black-and-blue bruise in the middle of his brow. He touched it with his fingertips and hissed as a bright bolt of pain shot straight into his temples, lingering there like a beast ready to strike out. Leaning closer to the small bathroom mirror, he noticed that the edges of the bruise were coloured green and red and beginning to turn an ugly shade of purple.

 

That bruise didn’t hurt nearly as much as his heart.

 

If anyone had told Schuldig that he would let someone hurt him, lie to him and threaten him, and that he would love that person and forgive them, he would have laughed. It would have been an impossible scenario, something out of a soap opera, something that would never happen to him.

 

Now he was not so sure. Now it had happened to him. Now everything was different. 

 

Love does funny things to people. 

 

Waking to a world of pain only cemented his opinion: he was mad, he had lost track of his own self somewhere along the way. Somewhere along that same way he hadn’t only lost track of himself but also learned that there _was_ one individual he was willing to give his life for. Up to a few days ago that individual had been Schuldig himself.

 

He hated Farfarello for that. It made Schuldig no different from the ordinary people he used to look down at, people whose mundane thoughts he despised and whose goals in life seemed insignificant next to his own. 

 

Schuldig had no goals in life now but to find Farfarello and to keep him and himself alive. Whatever the Irishman was planning for Eszet, whatever needed to be done, it was not nearly as important as Schuldig’s desire to close his arms around Farfarello and kiss the hell out of him...after slapping him into next week.

 

“Too often, Far,” Schuldig muttered at his mirror image above the bathroom sink. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me _three_ times...” 

 

Waking on the floor of the bedroom, a smear of his blood marking the place where he had banged his head against the door, Schuldig spent a long time staring at the ceiling. Partially because for long minutes, he feared something had been broken and that moving around might only worsen the pain that coursed through his body like a sinister snake on the hunt. Partially because he had needed time to come to terms with the fact that Farfarello had _again_ fucked him over. 

 

Had they not cleared things up between them? Had Schuldig not made it clear what he would do to him if he ever caught him lying again? 

 

Did Farfarello even care?

 

There were only a few times in Schuldig’s life when the telepath had been absolutely certain of something. His hatred for Eszet was one of those things, but that had boiled down to strong dislike and finally, carelessness. He didn’t give a damn whether they lived or died, whether some other poor Gifted was suffering under their reign or not. He had survived them; there was no reason why another Gifted should not. If people didn’t have the balls to keep their promises to themselves, who was he to save them?

 

His dislike for Takatori had been another of those things. The Japanese businessman had been an eyesore and a pain in the ass; he had been useless, powerless, and in the end, nothing more but a tool for Schwarz and Eszet subsequently. Schuldig hated him because he had had to deal with and serve him. That hate had been - and sometimes still was - a certainty.

 

That was where the list ended. Schuldig sometimes saw the world, himself included, as marks on a scale. As far as caring was concerned, he came at the top of his personal scale, with nothing between him and the melting pot of humanity at the bottom. Crawford, Nagi and Farfarello lay somewhere between him and that melting pot at the bottom. Lately though...

 

...lately, a certain white-haired, amber-eyed Irishman had managed to slowly but surely push and threaten and cajole his way close to the top - if he hadn’t already reached it. Schuldig all too often viewed that which he cared for as extensions of his own body and mind; there was no telling how much of Farfarello he already viewed as part of himself, how deeply the man echoed in him. 

 

He knew one thing though: he wanted him back at his side where he could touch and see him. 

 

He let the water out of the sink, watching it spiral down the drain. It was pink with his blood. He dumped the wash cloth into the waste bin and brushed his hair, tying an elastic band around it to keep it out of his face. He missed his bangs. They would have hidden the ugly bruise on his brow a little. 

 

It didn’t matter. There were more bruises waiting to be earned where he was going now. 

 

He stepped out of the bathroom and let the door fall shut behind him. Crawford and Nagi looked up as he walked into the kitchen, their faces blank and unreadable. The battered remains of Nagi’s laptop cluttered the kitchen table; there was nothing left to salvage except the hard drive, which Schuldig saw peeking out of the backpack resting near Nagi’s feet. 

 

Schuldig stopped at the head of the table and rested his fingertips on the plate, staring down at the remains. Nagi and Crawford’s faces bore bruises too; Farfarello’s psychic attack hadn’t only taken Schuldig out of commission. Their eyes were sharp and narrowed as he looked at them.

 

“Now what?” Nagi asked when a long moment of silence had passed.

 

Schuldig smiled coldly. “Now for payback.”

 

They followed him out to the car as though _he_ was the leader now, and perhaps he was. He didn’t waste time thinking about it.

 

Farfarello had taken his clothing and some of the money Crawford carried in his briefcase. He hadn’t touched the car keys. Nagi’s laptop had been the victim of Crawford’s body as he hit the table and toppled it over; Schuldig found him and Nagi sprawled on the floor of the kitchen and feared for a moment that Farfarello had killed them. They had been alive, though, if unconscious and slightly worse for the wear. 

 

Their car was the only one around, and the few Schuldig had seen in other driveways when they arrived were still there. A few hours of careful eavesdropping didn’t reveal anything out of the ordinary. No one had seen anything much less noticed the happenings inside their house. It frustrated Schuldig. People were likely to notice and remember the most useless facts, but no one had seen a six-feet-tall, white-haired, leather-clad Irishman leave the house in what had to have been a hurry. He gave up on trying to glean information from the people around them quickly. There was only one conclusion to come to here. Someone must have picked the Irishman up and driven him back to Tokyo. 

 

*********

**January 25 th, 2002, Tokyo**

**2155 Hours**

*********

 

The three young men seated around a table looked up with surprise and alarm as the door to the Seventh Serpent flew open. Schuldig strode in and lifted his arms, sighting in on the aghast expressions on their faces as they saw the guns he held in his hands. 

 

“Ah, ah, ah...” A note of warning crept into his voice as he saw the tallest of them reach for the gun he knew the man carried under his jacket. “Don’t do that. It makes me twitchy, and you don’t want to make me twitchy.”

 

The young man put his hands back on the table, eyes darting quickly back and forth between Schuldig and Crawford, who appeared at Schuldig’s side. “Who the fuck are you?”

 

“We’re the ones asking the questions,” Crawford said smoothly. He stayed at Schuldig’s side as they advanced on the table. “Who the fuck are you?”

 

They didn’t answer. Their eyes were glued to the guns in Schuldig’s hands; the telepath picked up a ridiculous amount of fear from their minds and deduced that they did belong to a gang but not a gun toting one, at least not one that used them on a regular basis. He gave them a once over and raised an eyebrow at their expensive, hip clothes and polished leather shoes. They wore shirts made of sheer silk and heavy Rolex watches. Chic hair cuts brought to perfection with hair gel and manicured, shiny fingernails now pressed against the table plate told him all he needed to know: 

 

“Nagumo was one of yours, wasn’t he?”

 

If possible, their faces conveyed even more surprise. Schuldig ignored Crawford’s questioning side glance and stepped closer to the table, lowering the guns accordingly. Feeling mean, he fired the left one, shattering a half-empty bottle of Bourbon Whiskey that stood between them. They shouted with fear at the sudden gunshot as much as at the flying glass splinters and pushed their chairs back, freezing as Schuldig raised the guns once more and smiled at them. 

 

“Now that I have your undivided attention, I do believe I asked a question.”

 

The tallest one, whose hand had wandered toward his gun, defiantly lifted his chin. “He was. What’s it to you, red-head?” 

 

“Nothing, really. It just leads to more questions.” Schuldig dismissed the other two from his attention and concentrated on the tall one. “Tell me your name.”

 

“Hajime.”

 

“Hajime.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Crawford draw his gun and turn to the two remaining young men. “You know Farfarello. Where is he?”

 

“I don’t know.”

 

“I don’t believe you, Hajime.” Schuldig smiled gently and pulled a chair out. He could have much easier gone into the young man’s mind, but he enjoyed playing this way, enjoyed that for once, he knew what he was doing and that he was good at it. That hadn’t been the case very often lately. “Someone like Farfarello doesn’t just vanish into thin air.”

 

“He’s dead.”

 

“First you say you don’t know where he is. Now you say he’s dead.” 

 

Hajime fidgeted and looked to the side. “The leader of the _Cadwallader_ comes and goes as he pleases. He is everywhere and nowhere. I don’t know where he is _now_.”

 

 _Cadwallader_? Schuldig had never heard that word before, much less in connection with his elusive Irishman. He had also never picked it up during the times he was present in the Seventh Serpent or around any of Farfarello’s people. Making a mental note of the word, he nodded encouragingly at Hajime. “Why are you here? The bar is closed.”

 

“We heard Farfarello is...gone. When Nagumo died we lost...privileges. Well, we never had those privileges.” Hajime’s voice carried a note of bitterness. “Nagumo was the only one allowed in here.”

 

He listened to Hajime’s explanation of how Nagumo had been the only member of their gang who had had the doubtable pleasure of being allowed into the Seventh Serpent. Remembering Nagumo’s infatuation with Farfarello, Schuldig could easily deduce that this pleasure resulted from nothing more than Farfarello’s amusement with the young man’s antics. He leaned against the table and considered Nagumo’s reaction to him, smiling slightly at the memory of openly displayed hostility. 

 

“...so we thought, I don’t know, we thought now that Farfarello isn’t here, we could, maybe, have some...”

 

“...fun?” Schuldig asked. “So you broke into the bar, knowing Farfarello isn’t here, to have your share of beverages that were forbidden to you before because your pal Nagumo was the only one who was allowed in here?”

 

Meekly, Hajime nodded and stared down at his hands. “Yes. It was stupid, we know that.”

 

“And yet you did it.” He was feeling more and more like a teacher berating an errant child.

 

“The forbidden always tastes best.”

 

Schuldig sighed. This was going nowhere. These young gangsters didn’t know anything vital, nor were they aware of the bigger picture. He glanced at Crawford to find the Oracle silently shaking his head. The faces of the other two young men were deathly pale, their eyes wide. Whatever Crawford had asked of them or told them must have scared them clearly out of their wits. He smirked at them, scaring them even more. Then he turned back to Hajime.

 

“You said - ”

 

“You’re Farfarello’s lover, aren’t you?” Hajime suddenly blurted out. “Nagumo told us about you before he was shot at the harbour a couple of days ago.”

 

Now it was his turn to be surprised. Considering Nagumo’s overall reaction to his appearance in the Seventh Serpent, he would not have put it past the young man to mention him as the ‘asshole from Farfarello’s past’, a thought he had had before. To be mentioned as Farfarello’s lover even to people outside of the Irishman’s inner circle almost shocked him.

 

He decided not to dwell on it. It was not important. “You said ‘Cadwallader’. What or who are they?”

 

Hajime was now staring at him with undisguised curiosity. “Nagumo lied. He said you are ugly and that you have the eyes of a monster.”

 

Irritated, Schuldig waved one of the guns in Hajime’s direction. “Yes, I am his lover.” He stepped away from the table and moved over to the young man, towering over him. Leaning down until his face was very close to Hajime’s he lowered his voice to a whisper. “I am his lover and I am searching for him because I’m afraid he’s going to do something stupid not even he will survive. I am a very desperate and edgy man right now, Hajime, and I will do everything I can to find him, even if it means turning every stone in this city upside down.” He took a breath. “Now, those ‘Cadwallader’. What or who are they? What do they have to do with him?”

 

The young man’s eyes were wide and fathomless, his mouth parted slightly. Hajime seemed transfixed by Schuldig’s eyes - something the telepath could understand, because they were blue and liked to appear green when the light hit them right, because they seemed centuries old yet sat in a young face. Eyes of a monster? He remembered Nagumo’s words echoed at him by Farfarello - ‘He thinks you’re a bad omen’.

 

If blue eyes meant being a monster, what did Farfarello’s amber eye mean to those people? Schuldig thought of that colour as interesting and refreshingly abnormal, but he had never seen it from a different angle. He had never assigned any meaning to that colour other than being out of the norm.

 

A religious, maybe even arcane angle, something that hadn’t figured into recent contemplations so far...but no, that was absurd. 

 

Or was it? 

 

A lot of things had had a religious touch lately. Things beyond Schuldig’s understanding and knowledge seemed to take on weight in importance. He hadn’t thought much of it before, but for some reason Hajime’s words about his eyes had struck a chord. 

 

Nagi’s question, days ago, sprang to memory. _Who was Lazarus of Bethany?_

 

He kept staring at Hajime’s dark eyes and mentally revisited recent events. The appearance of the strange sand, the arcane symbol found at the apartment wall of Yuuya Yamasaki, and Farfarello’s sudden if welcome sanity...Farfarello’s mother had been a nun, too...

 

 _Farfarello didn’t mean to stay hidden, I think. He’s made it painfully obvious he’s here, right from the start._ Manx’s words at the bar in Roppongi were added to the mix. _He’s the devil, that’s what they say._

 

The devil. More religious garbage, more opium for the masses. Theses and beliefs Schuldig thought of as the baggage of a race unable to bear the brunt of their own misdoings, so they needed deities to take the blame or the responsibility to dole out just punishment. It was just one more reason why Schuldig despised mankind as a whole and was happy to be different from them.

 

A seemingly worthless piece of memory floated from the morasses of his subconscious and struck another chord, but it was gone too quickly for him to grasp a hold of it. Something about Farfarello and a young girl, barely out of her teens...

 

“Please don’t kill me,” Hajime whispered under his breath, shattering the silence. “I don’t know what the Cadwallader are. Nagumo mentioned the name a few times and told us Farfarello is their leader. I don’t know anything else. Please don’t kill me.”

 

Schuldig blinked and moved away from the young man, shaking his mind free of sluggishly moving thoughts. Hajime’s began to press against his carefully constructed shields, thoughts about death and pain and not wanting to be a victim of either. He took a sharp breath and lifted the guns, firing two shots at Hajime. Twin sprays of blood hit the wall behind the young man as his face went from shock to pain to the expressionless mask of death. Schuldig turned from him before Hajime began to slide from the chair and let his gaze shift over his companions.

 

“Kill them,” he told Crawford, dismissing them from his attention once again at the sight of their terror-filled faces. “They don’t know anything.”

 

He turned from the table and walked backwards until he stood at the centre of the dance floor, looking up at the dark windows of the loft. Two more gunshots shattered the tranquil shadows cumulating in the corners of the bar, ending the pleading babble from Hajime’s companions. Crawford joined him on the dance floor, holstering his gun.

 

“What is it, Schu?”

 

He held up a hand and motioned for silence. Turning slowly, his eyes wandered over the walls of the loft. He caught his reflection in bottles and in the mirrors behind the bar, made another turn, and looked back up to the loft. Scanning the surfaces of its walls once more, he narrowed his eyes.

 

“Crawford, when you were at the apartments of those Eszet agents Farfarello killed without telling us, did you see anything out of the usual?”

 

The Oracle made a sound in the back of his throat. “What do you mean?”

 

“A mark. A sign. It would have been small and painted on a flat surface somewhere, like a wall. The one I saw was painted with the blood of one of Farfarello’s victims.”

 

There was nothing on the walls of the loft that he could see in this light. The sign at Yamasaki’s apartment had been in plain sight and at a place where it would be discovered by anyone who walked out of the room. He considered finding the main light switch for the dance floor illumination. 

 

“I saw something,” Crawford said slowly. “I didn’t think much of it. It looked like a box with a cross next to it.”

 

“Do you see something similar in here somewhere?” 

 

Endless moments passed as Schuldig waited for Crawford to study the walls just as he had done before. Finally, the Oracle shook his head. 

 

“I don’t see...”

 

Their eyes met. Simultaneously, they looked down at the floor. 

 

\---

 

Cast into light, the empty bar and dance floor looked even more deserted than they had when bathed in shadows. Schuldig switched on every light he could find, careless toward possible detection from the outside. They had dragged the corpses of the three young men against the far wall and pushed tables aside to make enough space as possible in the main room. 

 

Schuldig stood at the windows of the loft, Nagi next to him. Together, they looked down at the intricate swirls of colour decorating the dance floor. 

 

“I can’t believe we didn’t notice that before,” Nagi said, his voice soft with awe.

 

“Why would we have looked for it in the first place?” Schuldig lit a cigarette and leaned against the window. “It’s easy to miss, too. Usually, this place is packed with people. Hard to see something on the floor then.”

 

Below them, Crawford’s shadow briefly obscured the view of the design as he passed from the kitchen to the stairs leading up to the loft. He joined Schuldig and Nagi at the windows, jacket slung over his shoulder, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to the elbows. 

 

“This is the only room,” Crawford said, “The other rooms are all normal unless he had it worked into furniture or hired a Feng Shui master to do it for him.”

 

The Seventh Serpent’s dance floor was laid with darkly green linoleum that looked black if not seen from above or under harsh light. Here and there, the material’s overall colour was interrupted by lighter shades of green. From the frog perspective, these lighter patches seemed irregular and without order, but from the windows of the loft the shape of the box with the cross next to it was clearly visible. The design was large enough to take up most of the dance room floor. 

 

Now that they had discovered it, what did the symbol tell them? Schuldig traced its lines with his eyes, trying to find something, anything there that reminded him of something. He drew a blank. The cross, that was easy enough to understand. But the box?

 

“He’s marking territory,” Nagi said softly in contemplation.

 

“What?” Crawford asked.

 

“Territory. He painted this symbol onto the walls of the places where his enemies died, and he had it worked into the floor of his bar. That looks like marking territory to me.” Nagi shrugged and stepped away from the window. “Either that, or he has rather weird ideas of interior decoration. But Farfarello isn’t that superfluous.”

 

Schuldig and Crawford laughed. “Maybe he isn’t as sane as he wants us to believe if he paints crosses on walls,” Crawford said. “With his God fixation, no matter if he played at it or not, the cross makes sense. I see a cross and I _still_ think ‘Farfarello!’ automatically. But what’s the box supposed to be?”

 

“The shape of this ‘territory’?” Schuldig took another drag from the cigarette which had nearly burned down to the filter and dropped it on the floor to ground it out under his heel. “Maybe he chose it randomly. Maybe it has something to do with those ‘Cadwallader’ one of the guys mentioned.”

 

As he exhaled the smoke, he saw Nagi’s back stiffen just as the young man reached the table standing in the middle of the loft’s main room. He shot Crawford a questioning glance as Nagi then proceeded to hastily dig through the backpack that rested on a chair at the head of the table, muttering under his breath. 

 

“Nagi?” Crawford asked, stepping toward him.

 

“It’s not a box,” Nagi said, breathless as though he had just discovered something very important. “How blind are we? It’s not a box!”

 

“What...”

 

Nagi yanked something out of the backpack, heedless of the things that fell to the floor as it tipped over and spilled its contents. When he turned around, he held the Lazarus Stone in his hands.

 

\---

 

As interesting as the discovery was, it didn’t help them much. 

 

Schuldig rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling of Farfarello’s bedroom. He lay in the centre of the round bed, the pillows bunched under his head, and tried to fall asleep. As it was, his thoughts chased each other across the limitless plane of his mind, preventing him from finding the rest he needed. It didn’t help that he imagined that the sheets still smelled of Farfarello, or that each glance in the direction of the bathroom made him remember watching the wound on the Irishman’s back heal. He glanced at the window and the dark rain clouds flitting past outside.

 

 _One rain cloud...two rain clouds....it’s going to rain later..._

 

Nagi and Crawford had surrendered the bedroom to him without an argument and chosen the living room’s soft couches and armchairs instead. The discovery that the ‘box shape’ apparent in the symbol might indeed by the Lazarus Stone had entertained them for a while, but in the end their guesses at Farfarello’s intentions went off into the wild. They were tired and hurting still from the Irishman’s psychic attack. Schuldig could feel the bruise on his brow throb in time with his heartbeat. Although the pain had faded to a dull ache and a feeling of pressure, its very presence time and again reminded him of what Farfarello had done.

 

He could have killed Schuldig easily. He could have killed them all yesterday afternoon. Their bodies would not have been discovered until weeks later, when the owner of the remote place on the outskirts of Tokyo returned. Maybe they would not have been discovered for months. By the time someone found them, there would not have been much left but liquefied flesh and brittle bones. The thought made him uneasy. He rolled onto his side and burrowed deeper into the blanket, staring into the shapeless shadows in a corner of the room.

 

It was one thing to be superior to the majority of that which liked to call itself mankind. To be on the receiving end of someone’s attention who surpassed what Schuldig had up to now considered his superiority by _leagues_ was something else altogether. Although he knew that the Gifts varied like the grains of sand on the shore, the sheer knowledge that he had lived under the same roof with someone who easily withstood two of the most dangerous ones was disconcerting. Telepathy and Telekinesis were nothing to be trifled with.

 

Farfarello brushed both off as though they were annoying flies. He was more than a simple Biokinetic, a Gift Schuldig was familiar with. Crawford called the Gift Farfarello had used to kill the people at the bar in Roppongi ‘draining’, but for some reason Schuldig didn’t think it was the right term. It made him think of vampires, and that was not something he could bring into alignment with Farfarello. What Manx had described to him at the scene of the crime sounded more as though the Irishman was able to part body from soul; what he had seen him do to that woman only cemented that thought.

 

Now there was a concept that would bring religious rapture to the clergy all over the world. ‘There is a soul, and look, here is a guy who can make it visible. The process only works once though, and it’s deadly. No repeat performance. Please stand in line.’ 

 

He found himself mentally revisiting the times he had kissed Farfarello, touched him, and trustingly turned his back to him. Schuldig considered himself right up there with the dangerous predators. He smirked into the darkness as he thought that he could have lived without the knowledge of what Farfarello was capable of. He had never taken well to ego-bashing unless it was someone else’s. 

 

Schuldig sighed and rolled over onto his back again, throwing the blanket off. His hands found his jacket, which he had discarded at the edge of the bed; digging through it until he found the pack of cigarettes and the lighter, he sat up and smoked, legs crossed, staring at the dark sky.

 

“Damn you, you lunatic,” he whispered between drags. “I haven’t thought about you for years, and now you are all that’s on my mind...I can’t even sleep...and I’m talking to myself.” 

 

Somewhere along the way, Schuldig had already realized that Farfarello and the Lazarus Stone were connected in a way neither he nor Nagi or Crawford understood. The appearance of the strange sand that incidentally had the same colour as the stone could not be put down to coincidence. 

 

Farfarello didn’t leave things to coincidence or happenstance, that much Schuldig had learned in the last days. He planned meticulously ahead and considered all factors as far as they mattered.

 

Inevitably, Schuldig began to ask himself if everything that had happened between him and the Irishman had been planned, too. Although it hurt to think of himself as nothing more than a factor in a grander plan he was not meant to understand, he knew he could not put it past Farfarello’s mastermind abilities.

 

Mastermind. _He_ was supposed to be the mastermind! He was the one supposed to be playing with everyone instead of being played with! 

 

Had he been given more than just random glimpses at the workings of said plan, had Farfarello given them more than just lies and hints at everything, Schuldig might have understood him. He would not have been in half as much doubt. As it was, he had even less understanding of everything now.

 

A soft but urgent knock at the bedroom door interrupted his mental wanderings. He looked up to see the fuzzy silhouette of Crawford’s head appear as the door opened and picked up a feeling of danger from him at the same time.

 

“We’re in trouble,” Crawford said in a hiss. “Dress and get your guns. Prepare for a fight.”

 

Schuldig had never undressed in the first place and was ready in half a minute after stubbing the cigarette out on the marble edge of the bed. He met Crawford and Nagi in the loft’s main room, joining them at the table where Crawford was quickly unpacking the contents of Nagi’s backpack. 

 

“What is it?” He kept his voice low out of habit. If there was one thing he would never be in doubt of, then it was Crawford’s accuracy when it came to all things urgent, no matter how fragile the Oracle appeared to be lately. “What danger?” 

 

“We’re going to get visitors in a few minutes,” Crawford said, setting a box of ammunition onto the table next to a row of empty clips. “Make sure you have enough ammo.”

 

“Eszet?” Schuldig reached for the box of ammunition and methodically began to fill the empty clips. Reading the urgency rolling off Crawford in waves made him move quickly but without haste. 

 

“No.” Crawford surrendered another box into Nagi’s hands and opened another. “No one I recognize. A gang, maybe someone Farfarello pissed off at some point in time. His supposed death must have made the rounds by now. I don’t know what they want, but I know they’re armed. This isn’t going to be pretty.”

 

“Whatever is?” Nagi asked sarcastically. “We’re already in the toilet, it’s about damn time someone pulls the lever.”

 

Schuldig chuckled, finished with one clip. He put it into his jacket pocket and picked up the next empty one. He silently counted the seconds and arrived at 89 just as Nagi handed the last filled clip to Crawford.

 

“Take the backpack and go to the car,” Crawford instructed Nagi. “Schu and I are going to handle this one. We need the Lazarus Stone out of harm’s reach. No, we can’t all go. We need to take care of these guys. One problem less to deal with later.”

 

Nagi opened his mouth to protest but was cut short as Crawford made an abrupt gesture. “No arguments,” the Oracle said in a low growl. “Go to the car and make sure you get it out of here in one piece. Come back here in half an hour and pick us up. It shouldn’t take longer than that.”

 

“...provided we’re still alive by that time,” Schuldig said lightly, snapping a clip into his gun. “Go, Nagi. Farfarello left the stone with us, which means he wants it somewhere safe.”

 

Nagi shouldered the backpack. “You’re entirely in too much love, Schu.”

 

“And look what it does to me. I’m starting to behave like you did around that blue-haired airhead.”

 

“Stop bantering.” Crawford’s voice was sharp. “Get going. Schu, get ready. Is there a way out of here except for the front entrance and the back door?”

 

“Fire ladder out of the bedroom window,” Schuldig said. 

 

“Good. Nagi, take that way. Schu, we’re staying up here.” Crawford shoved full clips into his pockets. “Go.”

 

Schuldig was already by the windows of the loft by the time he realized that an order from Crawford still made him act without thinking twice about it. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Nagi disappear through the bedroom door. Crawford joined him at the window, a gun in either hand.

 

_[[Don’t overtax your telepathy, Schu.]]_

 

_[[Why, did you see something?]]_

 

Despite the murky darkness, he could see the pointed stare at his brow. Giving a nod of acquiescence, he flipped the safety off both SIG-Sauers and retreated to the edge of the window front, leaving the other side to Crawford. 

 

They waited. To Schuldig, this had always been the hardest part of an ambush. He could feel time stretch without coming to the point where it snapped and sent fine tendrils of his Gift out, searching for minds around them. Fingers gripping and relaxing around the guns, he caught the fading tail end of Nagi’s thoughts centred on getting away and then getting back. The young man had made it to the car just in time, it seemed, for Nagi’s quickly disappearing mind was replaced with other thoughts. He combed through them, careful not to dig too deeply. 

 

These new thoughts were centred mostly on revenge. He counted twenty different sources and wondered why they were so many; if Farfarello was believed to be dead, what did these men have to worry about?

 

Then he picked up their fear and nearly choked on it.

 

“Schuldig!” Crawford hissed from the other side of the loft. “What the fuck are you doing? I told you to stay _out_!”

 

He heard the Oracle as if through a great fog. The fear was everywhere. The men carried it with them like a shield. It was like honey, like molasses, melting and dragging him down toward a hungry mouth. He gritted his teeth and made the conscious effort to pull his mind free, gasping as it finally slid from that quagmire. There was something very wrong with those men - they were armed to the teeth but yet they were so afraid he could taste it. 

 

“Crawford,” Schuldig gasped, “There’s something wrong with them.”

 

“What?”

 

“They’re scared half out of their wits.” He blinked rapidly and knocked the side of his head against the wall, using the pain to firmly settle back in his own self. “I want one of them alive. I need to know what’s going on.”

 

A fully fledged frown settled on Crawford’s face much like a carrion bird on a corpse. An answer never came. The men had reached the Seventh Serpent. 

 

Gunfire tore into the night. 

 

Schuldig abandoned any attempt at mental conversation as the front door to the bar was sieved at the same time as heavy boots kicked down the backdoor. The bruise on his brow began to pulse in a staccato rhythm in time with each gunshot. It seemed the attackers had expected some kind of counterattack - ten pouring in from the front door came to an abrupt halt as they met the ten running in from the back and no one else. A cursory glance at their clothing revealed nothing out of the ordinary - most of them wore Jeans and shirts. Schuldig thought he saw tattoos on the hands of some of them, but in the dullness of the bar it was hard to be sure. 

 

“There’s no one here!” one of the men shouted. “What is this? We were tricked!”

 

“Shut up!”

 

“But there -”

 

Crawford shifted, his arm a blurry shape. The window he stood next to shattered, glinting shards raining down onto the dance floor, as he punched the glass in with the butt of his gun and aimed at the two men hovering close to the entrance door. Two gunshots rang out, so quickly they sounded like one. Two bodies fell, a third got added to the mix as one of the men tripped over them in a sudden burst of panic and Crawford’s third shot caught him in the back of the neck. 

 

Schuldig dropped to his knees, guns pressed close to his sides, glass shards raining down on him as the men below them fired at the windows of the loft. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Crawford press himself against the wall away from the window and wait for the firing to cease. He robbed toward the door on his stomach and opened his mind, grabbing onto the first random mind he could get a hold of. In their fear and surprise, it was easy to turn these men. 

 

Crawford’s guns singing behind him, Schuldig made two men shoot each other, much to the horror of their companions. Giving the door a firm kick, he fired two shots down the stairs, missing one man but catching the other square in the chest. He pulled his mind from the fading consciousnesses of the men he had forced to shoot each other and attacked the one he had missed, sending him sprawling backward down the stairs. 

 

An explosion of vivid, red pain tore the breath from his lungs and stalled him for the barest moment. Pushing with his feet, he rolled away from the door again just in time, machine gun bullets ripping up the stairs and into the ceiling of the loft. Schuldig turned his head to see Crawford change hands on his gun, blood staining the white cloth of his shirt over his left shoulder. 

 

“I’m all right!” the Oracle shouted, voice strained. “Go around. Behind!”

 

Crawford briefly sank to his knees, catching the SIG-Sauer Schuldig slid toward him across the floor. The telepath wasted no time. Gripping a spare clip in his free hand, he vaulted across the loft and fired a shot through the open door, meant more to startle than actually hit someone. He caught the sound of fierce babble but paid it no mind and raced into the bedroom, reaching the window just in time to shoot the man trying to climb through it. A short, choked scream ended abruptly as the attacker fell backward off the fire ladder and mingled with rapid gunfire from behind him. Schuldig jumped onto the windowsill, aiming down out of habit, and fired two shots. 

 

Both missed. Only a wild backward jerk saved him from a perforated chin as the shots fired from the man hanging onto the fire ladder hit the upper edge of the window. The harsh landing on his back pushed the air from his lungs and made him gasp like a fish out of water. Above the wild gunfire from behind - Crawford was using both guns now, he could tell - he heard the dim sound of boot heels on the metal rungs of the ladder. 

 

“Fucker!”

 

He snapped the man’s mind like a cobweb and chewed on it with mental teeth, viciously mangling it before he spit it back out. Having no time for more he pushed back to his feet and launched himself toward the window, scrambling over the windowsill and out. The drop to the ground below wasn’t a far one but his ribs protested with agony as his feet impacted with the ground next to two corpses. 

 

Wait...

 

Raspy breathing from the man who had tried to climb through the window made Schuldig hesitate. He briefly knelt down at his side and placed a hand on the man’s neck, sending him deeply into unconsciousness. 

 

“Stay alive for a while, buddy,” the telepath whispered under his breath. “I still need you.”

 

He had never left the Seventh Serpent through its backdoor, much less entered it this way. The sturdy metal door was open, a heavily bleeding man partially blocking it from falling shut again. Schuldig pushed the unresisting man to the side and kicked a gun out of the way before breaking the man’s jaw with a well-aimed boot heel. The grunt of pain was followed by bubbling and then nothing. 

 

_[[Crawford?]]_

 

 _[[What?]]_ Crawford’s mental voice was tinged with distinct annoyance. _[[I’m busy.]]_

 

_[[Just checking if you’re still alive.]]_

 

The short hallway was dark, the floor slippery with blood. Schuldig crouched low and edged forward, gun ready. Now came the tricky part. 

 

He spread himself thin and stretched his mental net into the main room of the bar, hopping from mind to mind. There weren’t that many left alive. Crawford might be injured, but he was one of the best shooters Schuldig had gotten to know over the years. He counted six corpses and two injured men from his vantage point and shot those two. 

 

That made seventeen dead if his count wasn’t off. Three were missing, but he could not detect them anywhere. They had most likely fled the scene. He kept a firm hold on the man he had shot through the window to keep him alive and advanced toward the main bar room, gun aimed at the ground. As he reached the end of the short hallway, he waited. 

 

During a fight, there was never enough time to think, only to act and survive. Now that it seemed to be over, Schuldig felt exhilarated and giddy, imagining the adrenaline to be pumping through his veins like a drug. He knew how addictive it could be - the rainstorm of bullets, the brutal snapping sounds as minds went out like the lights on a Christmas tree, the sheer excitement. There were no distractions, only he and the others and a frenzied fight for life. 

 

The tinny ‘plink’ of an empty bullet casing hitting the mirror behind the bar made him exhale softly and straighten up. He stepped around the corner of the hallway and looked up at the ghostly apparition of Crawford descending the stairs. There was a large dark stain at his left shoulder, spreading down to the waistline of his pants, and he held his left arm stiffly, the SIG-Sauer clutched tightly in his hand.

 

“A ricochet,” Crawford explained, expelling an empty clip from the gun in his right hand. It hit the last step with a hollow sound. “How many did we get?”

 

Schuldig expelled the clip from his own gun and checked the bullets. He had fired eight rounds and had seven left, plus three additional spare clips in his pockets and one he held in his hand. Exchanging the half-empty clip for a full one, he flipped the safety latch back on the gun and slid it behind his belt. 

 

“Seventeen if I counted right. Three are missing, but I think they ran away.” Stepping closer to Crawford, Schuldig pulled him off the last step and turned him around, trying to find an exit hole at the back of his left shoulder. He frowned when he didn’t find one. “The bullet’s still in there. How do you feel?”

 

“I’m okay,” Crawford said shortly, fishing a full clip from his pocket.

 

Schuldig read the exhaustion and the tremble in Crawford’s voice and firmly pushed him to sit down on the stairs. He switched the light on and saw what havoc they had wreaked: the entire bar room was littered with corpses. There were puddles of dark blood on the floor and the smell of gunpowder was tickling his nose. A closer look at Crawford revealed a light sheen of sweat on his brow and cheeks. 

 

“You need a doctor,” Schuldig murmured, pulling at Crawford’s shirt collar to reveal the raw, red entry wound directly beneath the ridge of his collar bone. He ran a finger through the mess of blood and was glad to find that the skin beneath was smooth. The bullet had missed the bone there by a mere inch.

 

They both looked at the door as the sound of a car coming to a halt outside the bar interrupted them. Schuldig picked up Nagi’s thoughts about how messy the corpses in the doorway were. He rose from his crouched position in front of Crawford, who rubbed a bloody hand through his hair and stood as well, crossing the bar in long strides. 

 

“I’ll be with you in a moment,” Schuldig remembered the man he had left unconscious just outside the backdoor. “I left one of them alive.”

 

“Hurry,” Crawford said and left the bar, his steps less than stable.

 

Schuldig turned back down the short hallway and stepped over the corpse at the backdoor. Kneeling at the side of the unconscious man he had shot through the window, he concentrated, finding the waning spark of the man’s mind, and fanned it until it resembled something akin to full consciousness. Dark eyes slid open, the pupils dilated so far they nearly expanded the irises. Blood bubbles stained the man’s lips cherry red - light blood, heart blood. He would die soon. Lightly resting his fingertips on the man’s brow, Schuldig pulled memory and thought into his mind like a sponge. 

 

He had to create a small place in his own mind to store the foreign information so he could go through it later; they neither had the time nor the resources to drag this dying man around with them, as much as he would have preferred this method. Assimilating someone’s complete psyche always made him uneasy; it was something he didn’t do often for fear of saturating too much of his own mind with someone else’s. 

 

As soon as the whirling river of pictures ceased, Schuldig pulled away from the man and rose. It was easy to destroy what remained of this being. He went back through the bar, eyes lingering on corpses covering up the symbol on the dance floor. Outside, the passenger door of Crawford’s rental BMW was open and inviting as the car waited at the curb, Nagi behind the steering wheel, a tight, serious expression on his face. 

 

Schuldig closed the car door to the sound of sirens quickly coming closer and thought, _Too late again, Manx. Sorry, babe._

 

\---

 

Nagi drove aimlessly for half an hour to lose any followers they might have before he slowed the car down at the curb of a frighteningly deserted street somewhere close to the harbour. The radio reported a shoot out at a bar in Ginza but didn’t mention a name or exact location, only that there was a high body count. Reporters at the scene of the crime described in exaggerated words how an entire gang seemed to have been obliterated in what had to been a fight for territory. 

 

Then, a name fell, but neither Schuldig nor Nagi could assign a meaning to it: Bloodhounds. A policeman had identified one of the corpses as belonging to that gang. 

 

“I need you to find a working computer and research some things for me,” Schuldig said as he climbed into the back of the car, where Crawford was sprawled on the seat, breathing shallowly. “First of all, ‘Cadwallader’. Farfarello is supposed to be their leader. I want to know who or what they are.”

 

He saw Nagi take notes on a piece of paper and moved Crawford to lean against the backseat, opening shirt buttons slippery with blood. Cursing at the lack of proper light in the car, he winced as he realized how much blood Crawford had lost; the Oracle’s entire left side was wet with it and each breath brought a new trickle from the gunshot wound in his shoulder. 

 

“I know you tried that before, but we _have_ to know what the Lazarus Stone really is.” 

 

“Schu, my laptop has gone to computer heaven thanks to Farfarello, and -”

 

“I know. But try again. We’ll get a new laptop next thing tomorrow morning.” He rooted around under the front seats for the first-aid kit and pulled it onto the seat between him and Crawford. “Bloodhounds. They’re a gang. I want to know in what way they might possibly be connected to Farfarello and what reason they would have to come destroy the Seventh Serpent if they think he’s dead anyway, unless they were trying to exorcize his ghost.”

 

Opening the first-aid kit, Schuldig cursed anew as he saw the meagre rolls of bandages and rusty pair of scissors lying unprotected in the dusty metal box. They should have brought their own; it had been more than stupid of them to trust a rental car to have tools to take care of gunshot wounds. At least the bandage rolls had been packed in plastic. He tore one open and pressed it against the bleeding wound, keeping it there with one hand as he tore open another and let it unroll. 

 

“I need to know about Biokinesis. I need to know what exactly having that Gift entails, I need to know the names of Biokinetics who were at Rosenkreuz or worked for Eszet at one point in time.” 

 

“Keep talking,” Nagi said, starting the car. “We need to move.”

 

Schuldig fixed the roll against the wound with lengths of bandage wound around Crawford’s neck and under his arm, pulling it tight to put pressure on the wound and keep the blood in. The renewed purr of the car engine around them made Crawford open his eyes and stare at the car roof for a few seconds before he gazed at Schuldig and closed them again. He picked up a feeling of gratefulness from him, mixed with slowly moving waves of pain. The thoughts he had sucked up from the dying man at the bar pushed against the fragile membranes he used to keep them in place, wanting out. 

 

“I want to know if there are records about a Gift describing what Farfarello can do, this ‘draining’ as Crawford called it. I want to know about his past. We didn’t find anything about him before, but let’s try a different avenue now. His mother’s name was Ruth. His foster family name is O’Siodhachain. I bet there aren’t too many people with that name in Ireland. I want to know who his father was.”

 

“I’d need to have access to church records,” Nagi muttered under his breath in the front of the car, driving exactly the speed limit along a street lined with tall warehouses. “Ireland...fuck, Schu, do you have any idea how much work this is going to be? Do they even keep their records on disk? Do they keep them in _English_? I can’t read Irish or whatever language it is Farfarello spoke at home. I’d need days, maybe weeks!”

 

“We don’t have days or weeks.” Schuldig pressed the back of his now bloody hand against Crawford’s brow and noted the change in body temperature. The Oracle was sweating but his skin was clammy. Schuldig looked out of the window and saw an unfamiliar row of houses pass them by. “Nagi, I don’t care _where_ you drive as long as it gets us to a hospital or a doctor. Crawford’s not doing too well.”

 

Grunting an affirmative, Nagi took a sharp turn at the next street crossing and drove toward the distant lights of Ginza, muttering under his breath. Draping the shirt back around Crawford’s shoulders to keep him from cooling further, Schuldig put his hand over the wound to exert additional pressure and prepared for mindfucking several nurses and at least one doctor over at wherever Nagi was driving them now. 

 

\---

 

They arrived at a nondescript hotel just before dawn. Crawford leaned heavily on Schuldig, but at least he was fully conscious if doped up to the gills with painkillers. Nagi had stopped the car in front of the first place that bore a hospital sign - a beauty clinic specializing in breast surgery - and left it to Schuldig to threaten the doctor in attendance into taking care of the injured Oracle. 

 

Holding a gun to the doctor’s head as he worked, Schuldig had then realized just how tired he was _now_. Crawford had been right - he _had_ overtaxed himself, using his Gift so shortly after a head injury, so he had forgone any attempt at mentally persuading the doctor into helping them and resorted to the use of his gun. 

 

“I’m gonna shoot Farfarello,” Crawford slurred. He was blinking rapidly at the house they approached. “I’m so gonna shoot him for that.”

 

“You’ll do nothing of that sort,” Schuldig said firmly, ringing the bell next to the door. “If there’s any shooting to be done, I’ll take care of that.”

 

“Shut the fuck up, both of you.” Nagi carried his backpack and looked as tired as Schuldig felt. 

 

An elderly man, dressed in a house kimono, opened the door and stared at them. His bleary eyes widened as he took in the state they were in; Schuldig got a foot in the door before it shut in their faces and pushed the man back into the hallway of the hotel. It was not really a hotel, more of a bed and breakfast place, but it would do. What they needed now was rest, not room service. 

 

“Where are we?” Crawford leaned against the wall of the hallway, arms slung around his middle. He was deathly pale and still sweated profusely, worrying Schuldig. “I’m tired.”

 

This was not the first time one of Schwarz was injured, but before now it had mostly been Farfarello. The telepath suddenly found himself remembering all the times he had watched the Irishman stumble toward his cell, leaving a trail of blood or limping. They had sent him against enemies so often and patched him up afterward that it was a miracle Farfarello hadn’t killed them all out of revenge; but who was he to know what moved the Irishman? 

 

The only scars on Farfarello’s body were the ones on his face. Everything else had been a charade.

 

The real scars, the ones that mattered, Schuldig knew by now, were on the inside and well hidden from prying eyes. 

 

Maybe this was Farfarello’s revenge now. Maybe everything that happened to Schuldig, Crawford and Nagi from this point on made Farfarello laugh and say that they deserved everything they had coming their way. Maybe Farfarello had spent the last five years waiting for the very day Schwarz stepped back into his life, just to have the chance to royally fuck them up. 

 

He wanted a bed, and he wanted it now. His shields were slipping, allowing Crawford’s pain and murky feelings of revenge to mingle with his own. There were the thoughts of the gang member from the bar, too. It was a dangerous mix of foreign emotions, pressing against his core, making him feel open and vulnerable - 

 

“Shut him up,” Schuldig said, viciously kicking the babbling man on the floor who tried to get back to his feet. The kick sent the old man tumbling against the wall, where he started to moan and hold his head, complaining loudly about foreigners and their strange manners. 

 

_You’re going to get blood all over my good carpet! Why are you bleeding? Who are you?_

 

A loud crack was followed by blessed silence, and Schuldig sent Nagi a grateful glance. Invisible hands lifted the corpse of the man off the floor and floated him down the hallway toward the rooms at the back of the house, Schuldig, Crawford and Nagi following. Despite the mental strain he was under already, Schuldig checked those rooms.

 

“We’re lucky. We’re the only ones in here, not counting his wife sleeping in the room behind that door at the end of the corridor.”

 

“I’ll take care of her.” Nagi left Schuldig and Crawford, floating the corpse ahead of him. 

 

Schuldig wasted no time. He opened the first door and moved Crawford inside, toward the primly made bed. Yanking the cover off, he guided the American to sit down and helped him lie back. Crawford was out like a light the second his head touched the covers. 

 

Too tired to check on his mind, Schuldig drew the covers over Crawford and looked around the room. A closet, a table and a chair, flowers in a small glass vase, European-styled curtains before the single window - a place like any other for those tourists who could not afford to stay at a hotel. He went back and locked the front door to give them a bit of security for at least a few hours. Walking back, he saw Nagi drag a comforter into Crawford’s room and nodded. He chose the room next to theirs and didn’t bother to take his shoes off as he lay down.

 

He still had work to do before he could get some well-deserved rest. 

 

It was hard to find the way to his core after the day’s chaotic happenings. It was sometimes hard to find it after a _normal_ day, when it was buried under impressions and thoughts not his own. Schuldig lay on his back and stared at the ceiling, imagining a spider’s web to grow up there and following its silvery lines across the stone, back and forth again to its centre. He cast aside the memory of gunfire and smoke, blood and screams and terror, and sought the calmness he knew he had been losing steadily over the years. Sorting that which was his own from that which was not, he slowly found his way to the thoughts and the memory of the dead gangster from the bar, finding them again in the very same corner he had pushed them into earlier. 

 

There was so much garbage! He had sucked up this man’s entire life...

 

Sighing, he went to work and parted the old from the new. What he was looking for could not be older than five or six years, maybe even less.

 

*********

**January 26 th, 2002, Tokyo**

**1020 Hours**

*********

 

He woke to a blinding, pounding headache and moaned, rolling over onto his side to bury his face into the wonderfully soft pillow, inhaling the scent of laundry deterrent, fabric softener and old flowers...

 

...flowers. Aya Fujimiya. The sister of Ran Fujimiya, who had so bitterly fought against Schwarz that in the end, white had nearly obliterated black had it not been for a wild stroke of luck. 

 

Schuldig opened his eyes to bright sunlight streaming around the curtains and knew one thing with startling clarity: Farfarello had never laid a hand on that girl although she had been with them for nearly a month. He had refused to so much as go near her. 

 

The only time he had been in the same room with her was during that cursed ritual that nearly cost all of them their lives. Schuldig hadn’t thought much of it back then, but for some reason he remembered it now; memory spurned on by the smell of slowly wilting flowers on the windowsill of this dank little place at the ass end of the city. 

 

Aya Fujimiya hadn’t aged a day in all the years she had lain unmoving and in a coma; hadn’t withered away slowly as most coma patients did, their muscles atrophying under the steady influence of drugs meant to keep them alive, their flesh melting away from their bones. 

 

Why did he remember this insignificant fact now, after all these years? 

 

He kept his eyes closed and relaxed, calling up the memory of that day nearly six years ago, when he, Crawford, Nagi and Farfarello had stood before the Elders of Eszet and listened to their brittle voices speaking of rituals, star constellations and power. Power beyond believe, beyond classification, power that was very much within their reach. 

 

Aya Fujimiya had played a vital role in _gaining_ that power. As the supposed host for the monster Eszet were trying to rouse from its long sleep in oblivion, the girl had been the heart and soul of the ritual, the vessel. Simply by exchanging the sister of Ran Fujimiya with another girl Schwarz had managed to overthrow all of Eszet’s plans and cast the ritual into chaos. Weiss had done the rest of the work for them. 

 

The Elders had died that day, taking with them all those insane dreams of power and finally, the knowledge of how to work the ritual. With the deaths of the Elders, Eszet’s slow but steady decline into a useless grouping of power-hungry megalomaniacs had been sped up considerably. 

 

His thoughts returned to Aya Fujimiya. At sixteen, she had been cast into a coma. Still, Eszet wanted her. Back then Schuldig had believed that it was her helpless state that called to them - a more willing because defenceless vessel for that monster could not be found. 

 

Yet it hadn’t been her helplessness that called to them like a beacon. It had been her Gift.

 

How could they have been so blind to the evidence right beneath their noses? 

 

Aya Fujimiya had been a Biokinetic - still was, most likely, considering he knew that Manx had helped in getting her out of the Lazarus Temple back then - whose very nature made her the perfect recipient of an essence. Her coma, her agelessness - brought on by an accident. He remembered touching her mind, carefully and slowly because no one really knew what went on in the mindscapes of the comatose, what abysses lurked there, and withdrawing quickly at the vast and empty space he encountered. 

 

Yet had it really been empty? Farfarello’s shields were like glassy membranes, giving under Schuldig’s mental fingers up to a certain point until they retaliated and pushed the unwanted presence out. Perhaps the girl’s mind had simply withdrawn the same way her body had withdrawn from the world around her. Assuming that every Biokinetic had the same amount of power was as foolish as saying that every Telepath could go only so far; Aya’s Gift had been untrained, uncontrolled, doing her no favour when the accident caused _all_ of her to shut down. 

 

Trapped in a stasis with nothing but a watchful Gift to keep her the way she had been up to the point of the accident, another shock to her system was probably all it would have taken to wake her up.

 

With the Elders gone, the knowledge of working the ritual and the knowledge of what was _needed_ for the ritual should have been lost. But was it?

 

Why were Eszet returning to Japan now, on the brink of falling prey to their own stupidity and greed, reaching their claws out for a land that had nothing to offer them...except for another Biokinetic?

 

Farfarello. 

 

The Biokinetic who had been directly under Eszet’s nose all the time. The Biokinetic who had hid himself in the eye of the storm and came out the winner in the end. The one person who had fooled them all - for years. 

 

Schuldig slid his eyes open, staring at the fluffy surface of the pillow, and watched particles of dust see-saw through the air before him. 

 

“They’re going for another ritual,” he whispered. 

 

\---

 

Seeing Crawford float through the open kitchen door was quite a sight, Schuldig had to admit. He could not decide which amused him more, the annoyed, tortured expression on the Oracle’s face or Nagi’s stony, no-bullshit one as he manoeuvred Crawford right up to the kitchen table and even pulled a chair out for him. 

 

Schuldig had drawn the curtains before the kitchen windows to keep nosy neighbours from peeking in and hoped that all good tourists had the grace to knock on other bed and breakfast doors for at least another three hours. They needed that time to think and plan. 

 

Crawford sat down heavily, grumbling at Nagi who still hovered behind him like a watchful mother hen. He was deathly pale, the blood loss weakening him to the point where his movement looked slow and sluggish to everyone who knew how Crawford usually moved, but at least he seemed to have his senses back together. A quick shower and a fresh shirt made him look halfway human. “There was no need to carry me, _mom_. I’m quite capable of walking on my own.”

 

Nagi took the barb with a shrug, eyes briefly resting on Schuldig. “All right, next time I’ll let you break your neck in the shower.”

 

Leaning against the kitchen counter, Schuldig sipped a cup of coffee and waited for Nagi to sit down. Neither Crawford nor the young man had taken kindly to the rude awakening Schuldig had given them half an hour ago, yet the telepath needed to share his insights with them and could not wait. 

 

Somewhere out there, Farfarello’s life was at stake. Hell, if the Elders managed to go through with their plan, all their lives were at stake. Schuldig had no idea if he was capable of helping Farfarello, but he knew that he wanted to be close to him come what may. And if the worst happened, if Farfarello died, then Schuldig wanted to be close to someone he could kill for that.

 

“What’s so important that you had to wake me, Schu? It better be worth it.” Crawford rested his chin in his hands, sighing. “Between running after Farfarello, getting shot and fighting off the hordes of darkness, I fear I’m becoming old.”

 

The joke fell flat. Schuldig put his cup down on the counter and walked over to the table, spreading his fingers on its top. He had put the Lazarus Stone on the table while he waited for Nagi and Crawford to emerge from the bathroom, staring at the damn thing for endlessly long minutes. Now that he had an inkling of what was going on, he thought he understood the stone’s role in all this a little better. 

 

“Eszet are coming here for perform another Resurrection.”

 

He waited for a reaction but none came; looking from Nagi to Crawford he saw their disbelieving stares. Crawford was the first to get his slack jaw back under control. “Schu...the ritual can’t be worked. There is no host.”

 

“There is. Farfarello.”

 

“Farfarello?” Nagi asked, leaning back in his chair to cross his arms over his chest, the doubtful expression on his face speaking volumes. “Farfarello. Yeah, I can so see him dressed in a white flimsy nightshirt, waiting for a ghost to take over his body.”

 

“I’m serious,” Schuldig said sharply. “Now is not the time for jokes. I think that Aya Fujimiya was a Biokinetic, too, and that’s the reason Eszet wanted her for the ritual. That’s the only reason why we ever had to deal with her and her brother after Takatori went down.”

 

“Aya Fujimiya,” Crawford said, stretching the name as though he thought Schuldig had lost what little was left of his sanity over the course of last night, “Aya Fujimiya spent four years in a coma, during which she....” The Oracle glanced at the Lazarus Stone, blinked, and looked up at Schuldig. “During which she didn’t age, didn’t change. Just like Farfarello never changed.”

 

Schuldig nodded, “Thanks to their powers. That’s what attracted us to Aya in the first place, remember? Why else would Eszet be interested in a comatose girl on the other side of the planet?”

 

“Wait a second,” Nagi interrupted, “Farfarello and Aya are the same?”

 

“Yes. With the only difference that Eszet knew about her while they didn’t know about him. Just as _we_ never knew about all the things he kept from us.” He pulled a chair out and sat down, continuing, “Remember what Weyland told us that night? He said that what’s left of Eszet is moving to Japan because the spiritual potential of this country is greater than Europe’s - that’s complete bullshit. That’s what they _want_ us to believe. I think they’re moving here because Farfarello is here, and considering what havoc he wreaked on them so far it looks to me as though they’re trying for one fell swoop to get both him _and_ their internal problems taken care of.”

 

“Take everyone still loyal to Eszet with them, exterminate those who thought about rebelling, work the ritual of Resurrection with yet another troublemaker, thus taking care of _that_ problem...” Crawford nodded slowly, eyes fixed on the Lazarus Stone. “A smart move. They’ll have a new power base here, and if they manage to work the ritual they’ll have their great leader, someone everyone else is going to fear. No more revolts against their regime.”

 

“That’s probably also the only reason why Farfarello isn’t dead yet.” Schuldig lit a cigarette, the familiar taste of nicotine balsam on his nerves. He hadn’t realized how nervous and excited at the same time he was until now that he felt his fingers shake when they lifted the cigarette to his lips. “Rerouting their belongings, killing the agents they sent - why else would they let him get away with all the shit he’s done to them? They need him! Somewhere along the way someone must have figured out what he is.”

 

Nagi shook his head, “So the stunt at the harbour was nothing else but a charade to make them believe he’s dead? No wonder he was so pissed when we caught him.”

 

“I know something else,” Schuldig said with a cold smile, “That gang Crawford and I levelled at the Seventh Serpent? Henchmen. Tools bought by Eszet. Your usual ungifted scumballs fooled into believing that they somehow matter in the big picture. Think Takatori. I managed to find a few interesting titbits in the memory of that man whose mind I assimilated. The Bloodhounds were a local group, small on the grand scale of criminals, but they thought that with the help of their overseas ‘friend’ they could rise to fame. They had an inkling of what Far is.”

 

“So they come to the bar to kill him after everyone thinks he’s dead?” Nagi asked.

 

“Not to kill him.” Crawford said, frowning. Schuldig only needed to take a look at him to know that the gears in his mind were circling viciously fast. “To kidnap him.”

 

Schuldig nodded. “They figured, hey, if that ‘gaijin’s’ life is so important to our overseas friend, let’s see what they’ll shell out for him.” He had to laugh under his breath at the thought of someone kidnapping Farfarello out of his own bar. The Irishman would have eaten them for breakfast with a spoon and then asked for seconds. “Hence the shitload of guns. They knew what damage he could do; hell, the local _police_ know what damage he can do, that’s why they stay _away_ from him. The plan was something along the lines of injuring him so they could overpower him.”

 

“Not much of a plan,” Crawford said derisively. “All right. Your theory holds water. At least it makes more sense than everything else we thought of so far.”

 

“So glad you approve,” Schuldig muttered under his breath, lighting another cigarette on the stubble of the first one. “What’re we gonna do now?”

 

“Find Farfarello...again?” Nagi suggested, shrugging. “That’s all we’ve been doing lately, so why not stick with the plan? It worked so far.”

 

Schuldig said, “We don’t have to find him. I have a pretty good idea of where he is.”

 

\---

 

It had snowed sometime during the night, not much but enough to give cars and roofs a light, white covering. Schuldig felt the bite of cold air against his skin as he stepped out of the door, shielding his eyes against the sudden brightness. Behind him, wrapped in a blanket and hating every second of it as far as the telepath could tell from his black thoughts, Crawford walked slowly but steadily. They had raided the fridge and cabinets of their impromptu ‘hotel’, throwing together a hasty breakfast. 

 

Hasty, although Schuldig knew that there was no cause to hurry. He thought he knew where Farfarello was and probably would be for some time, still; it was the only possible hideout he had left in a city that was quickly becoming his many-faced enemy. 

 

They had done nothing to hide the corpses or clean up their traces; _that_ would have been a waste of time. The danger of being pursued by the local police paled in comparison to what Schuldig thought awaited them now. As he sat down behind the steering wheel of the car, he glanced in the direction of Ginza. The cold had lifted the usual smog hanging over the city a little, allowing him to see all the way to the solitary glass needle of the Takatori Tower. 

 

That tower was slowly but surely becoming a symbol for everything Schuldig hated although the man who had had it built had been dead for years now. He thought he could see the miniature shape of a helicopter sitting on the roof but knew that it was nothing but his own imagination going wild; they were on the other end of the city, too far away for him to see anything. 

 

He could not see them, but he felt them. Every Gifted, whether or not they were aware of their talents, could feel the presence of the Eszet Elders; it was something they had always used to their advantage, and the telepath doubted the new Elders had changed anything about that. To Schuldig it felt as though a gentle hand was slowly closing around his throat, the pressure subtle and imperceptible...for now. 

 

It was not so much that the new Elders were terribly powerful - hell, they had gotten rid of the original leaders of Eszet easily enough. It was the knowledge of what they stood for, and more importantly, what stood _behind_ them. The combined powers of all of Eszet were nothing to be trifled with. Schuldig knew for a fact that Schwarz’s victory five years ago had been mostly due to the circumstances; the old leaders had come alone with nothing but a few lackeys at their sides, a few scientists to whom a gun was the equivalent of a hayfork in the hands of a seamstress. 

 

If it came to a fight - and there would be a fight, he knew that much with certainty - it would be like nothing Schuldig had ever seen or taken part in before. 

 

“I’ll drop you off at the apartment. Meet me later at the appointed place as soon as you have everything, but give me at least two hours. I need to talk to him alone.”

 

In the back of the car, Crawford buried deeper into the blanket, muttering something under his breath that Schuldig knew was an insult to every lovesick fool on the planet, himself included. He let it slide and looked at Nagi next to him. 

 

“You still want me to look up all those things you told me yesterday night?”

 

“No. But I need information about something else...”

 

He drove them back to Dogenzaka, keeping an eye out for any pursuers. Though he knew that it was too soon, he also kept his mind open, the bits and pieces of thoughts he snagged from everyone they passed on their way back to the old Schwarz base telling him nothing interesting. It was a normal day for everyone.

 

Everyone except them. 

 

The number of police cars on the streets was considerably higher than in the last few days, thanks to recent events. Schuldig gave Ginza a wide berth and tried to see the remnants of destruction at the harbour, but to his disappointment he had to learn that the entire Fish Market had been declared off-limits to civilians. He saw a group of techs bent over something on the ground, swiping at it with brushes. A few press vans stood just outside the banderol surrounding the entire area. 

 

 _Lucky fools_ , Schuldig thought as he passed by. _Keep living your insignificant little lives._

 

After seeing Crawford and Nagi into the abandoned building block in Dogenzaka, Schuldig turned back into the city, finding the police station between Ginza and Shintomi with ease. He had no eyes for the imposing beauty of the Imperial Palace and its surrounding park; his eyes were on the squad cars parked in front of the police station, the uniformed men and women lingering at the curb, appearing more nervous to him than Schuldig was used to. 

 

He parked the car a few streets down and walked back on foot, preparing himself. Casting an illusion on people he walked past was something he usually did with ease, yet with the recent strain he had put on his Gift and his body, he knew that what came now would be hard work. 

 

People expected people to be normal, ordinary; it was the extraordinary that attracted unwanted attention. The first thing they would see about him was that he was no one interesting, just a middle-aged Japanese in a business suit and black shoes, with black hair, black eyes and a slightly crooked nose surrounded by small red dimples. He projected the universal hastiness of a man on the way to an important meeting, just one of a million overworked, underpaid office dogs with a wife and a kid somewhere in a too small apartment he paid too much rent for. 

 

He was a man everyone was familiar with and that no one wanted to bother because they all knew what it was like, the rat race in Tokyo. Smiling timidly at one of the female officers standing on the stairs before the police station, Schuldig maintained the illusion until he stood in the elevator and pressed the button for the third floor. As soon as the doors closed, he breathed a sigh of relief and shattered the illusion, feeling its weight slide off him like an additional skin. 

 

He didn’t like wearing someone else’s skin, even if that someone else was just a figment of everyone else’s imagination. People were so irked by others who had something they didn’t; Schuldig knew that if the great collective mind of humankind had its way, no one would be special, no one would be beautiful, and everyone would be happy because no one was different. 

 

He liked being special even if it was work at times. Being different from everyone else was easy; fitting in was what so few people managed. 

 

The third floor of the precinct was deceptively quiet, so much so that he could almost feel it like a muffling curtain slowly sinking down around him as he stepped out of the elevator. Alone in the long corridor, Schuldig slipped his hand under his jacket, fingers caressing the butt of one of his guns. 

 

If he was right, if what he thought Farfarello was up to was true...

 

Knocking sharply on the door to Manx’s office, Schuldig didn’t wait for an invitation and pushed the door open, stepping inside. 

 

“I’m here for my lover,” he said evenly, eyes seeking out the familiar form of said lover perched on the edge of Manx’s wide desk. “Hello. Cute face.”

 

Farfarello was slack-jawed, his eye so wide open that Schuldig thought it was going to pop from its socket any moment. He held a cup cradled against his chest, his other hand clutching a folder on the desk. Manx, standing next to him in her customary red dress suit and high heeled shoes, stared at Schuldig as though he had suddenly grown a second head. 

 

“I thought he -” Manx said, turning to Farfarello, but a violent gesture from the Irishman cut her off. Farfarello slipped off the desk and set the cup down hard, sloshing the liquid inside. 

 

“Well, that’s a surprise, isn’t it?” Schuldig said softly as Farfarello stood before him. “You didn’t hit me hard enough. I didn’t see stars.”

 

“You’re not supposed to be here,” Farfarello growled under his breath. “Damn you, Schu...” 

 

“You’re not going to survive if you try to stop the Resurrection with just the help of a few non-Gifted, Far,” Schuldig said, ignoring the Irishman’s apparent agitation. He glanced at Manx and then fixed his eyes on Farfarello. “She might have a few good men, but they’re cannon fodder for Eszet. You know that. I know that. Do _they_ know that? Does _she_ know that?”

 

“I know,” Manx said, her voice surprisingly steady. Schuldig could taste her uneasiness and confusion, but he could also feel her determination. “I don’t care.”

 

“Oh, so you don’t care that you’re leading your men into certain death? How -”

 

Farfarello’s hand wound into the front of his shirt. The Irishman gave him a hard push that sent Schuldig stumbling backward, out of Manx’s office. He caught himself against the wall and looked up to see Farfarello yank the door shut, an expression on his face that bordered between despair and anger. 

 

Straightening up, Schuldig squared his shoulders. Silence hung between them. It was shattered by the meaty crack of his fist against Farfarello’s lips as he punched him. The Irishman took a step back, shaking his head and reaching up to touch a finger to his split, bleeding lip. He was unfazed by the punch, just as Schuldig had known he would be. “Did that hurt? No? Well, then maybe _this_ will!”

 

The second punch hit Farfarello’s cheek, hard enough to make the small bones in Schuldig’s hand tingle with pain. He ignored it and drew his arm back a third time, spittle flying from between his clenched teeth as he shouted, “Oh wait, I forgot, you -”

 

Farfarello intercepted the third punch, grabbing Schuldig’s fist in his hand just before it reached his face, and then gave a shout of anger as Schuldig’s other hand impacted sharply with the side of his head. “Damn you! Stop hitting me!”

 

Schuldig yanked his knee up, burying it in Farfarello’s stomach, and smiled grimly as the Irishman doubled over, coughing. “I hope you know that I am _fucking_ angry, Far, and not for the obvious reasons.” 

 

He set his foot down, twisted, and snapped his elbow up under Farfarello’s chin, distinctly hearing the sound of Farfarello’s teeth cracking together. More blood dribbled down his chin, mingling with that from his split lip. Farfarello’s fingers lost their grip on his fist, which gave Schuldig the opportunity to punch him once more, viciously, sending him down on one knee. 

 

He took a step back and kicked him in the face. Farfarello’s head snapped back as he lost his balance and fell against the door.

 

“Do you want to die, Far? Want to see God? I can arrange that meeting!”

 

Farfarello leaned his head against the door and looked up at the telepath. His nose was broken and crooked. The skin on his right cheekbone was open, a ragged laceration running parallel to his eye, bleeding heavily, staining the collar of his shirt. The edges of the laceration moved, shivered; while Schuldig watched, breathing heavily, the skin began to grow back together. 

 

Never taking his eye off Schuldig, Farfarello reached up and gripped the bridge of his nose between thumb and index finger, pushing the cartilage back into position. “What’s your point?”

 

He pulled one of the guns and had the barrel pointed at the Irishman’s head before the last word left his mouth, “There is no point.”

 

Staring at the gun, Farfarello slowly shifted his glance to Schuldig’s face. He didn’t say a word, didn’t move, remaining motionless where he had fallen against the door. The bruise-coloured skin on his face returned to its normal pallor. 

 

“Open up, Far. Let me in.” Schuldig said, hating the tremble in his voice. “Or so help me, I’ll shoot you.”

 

“You shot me before.”

 

“You’re right!” Knowing he was dancing perilously close to the edge of madness, Schuldig lifted the gun to his own head and pressed the barrel against the side of his brow. “That better?”

 

Farfarello’s “NO!” mingled with his own words; he saw the Irishman push to his feet and someone round the corner at the other end of the corridor at the same time. Farfarello’s weight crashed into him as he swung his gun arm around and pulled the trigger, the loud bang and resulting choked scream echoing around him. 

 

Schuldig’s back hit the wall. He was nearly lifted off his feet as Farfarello pushed against him, one hand grabbing for the gun, the other winding around his waist. The feeling of strength leaving his upper body as though someone was draining him...and that didn’t really come as a surprise, now did it? He was amazed Farfarello hadn’t simply paralyzed him from the waist up the moment he lifted the gun to his own head.

 

Over Farfarello’s shoulder, Schuldig saw the door to Manx’s office fly open; the chief of police stared at them and then looked down the corridor, the line of her lips turning hard and thin as she saw the corpse lying on the floor next to the elevator. She seemed not to know what to make of the tableau and opened her mouth, physically recoiling as Schuldig snapped into her mind, _[[Stay the fuck out of this.]]_

 

 _[[And what the fuck am I supposed to do about this?]]_ Pointing down the corridor, Manx shook her head and cursed under her breath. She stalked out of her office and left the door open. _[[Get in there. No one needs to see you.]]_

 

He wondered where she had learned to respond to telepathic speech that well but paid no more attention to it as he heard the sound of booted feet clamour up the stairs. His gunshot had probably alerted the entire precinct. Pity that good plans always had one distinct drawback. 

 

 _[[Middle-aged man, black hair, business suit_ , _]]_ Schuldig called to Manx once more. He turned his head, lips brushing the hair on top of Farfarello’s head. The Irishman hadn’t moved an inch since pushing Schuldig against the wall, face pressed against the side of Schuldig’s throat, hands like vice around his wrists, holding them immobile against the wall. Schuldig noticed that the strength was only very slowly returning to his arms. “Far. We gotta move.”

 

Farfarello didn’t respond and remained stationary, making him wonder if he had gone into shock. At least the strength was slowly returning to his arms. He flipped the safety latch of the gun back into its proper place and nudged Farfarello with his chin, rubbing his cheek through his hair. “Far! Are you listening to me?”

 

Still no response. Time was running out. He heard Manx shout an order and knew she was blocking the way into the corridor, but there was no telling how long she would manage to keep unwanted company at bay. Really pushing against Farfarello now in an effort to move them both through the invitingly open office door, Schuldig gritted his teeth as the Irishman’s weight didn’t budge. He knew that not even Manx could help them if the cops found them like this, two strangers pressed against the wall, one of them doing a very good impression of a clam. Not to mention the gun Schuldig still held. 

 

He tried and was surprised as it worked.

 

 _[[Far!]]_

 

The glassy membranes surrounding Farfarello’s core like cellophane gave under his mental fingers, gave until they snapped and greeted Schuldig with darkness and light, sound and silence. He thought he could feel the remains of the shields cling to him as he tumbled forward into a place he had wanted access to ever since meeting Farfarello for the first time. They were sticky, those remains, like fingers coated in honey, different from what he had felt all those years in the past. Once he was free of them, Schuldig searched for something to hold onto on his path into this unknown place. 

 

There was nothing. 

 

He fell into Farfarello’s mind like Alice into the Rabbit Hole. 

 

The impact on the ground, when it finally came, was harder than he expected. 

 

\---

 

_[[What were you expecting, idiot? Feathers and soft pillows?]]_

 

The voice came from everywhere and nowhere at once, surrounding him like the icy waters he had once broken through -

 

\- as a child, playing on the frozen surface of the forbidden river, but no, this was not him, this was not his past, his memory. 

 

Schuldig opened his eyes and sat up, blinking. The shreds of memory he had picked up fled from him like fog. He was sitting on something that was soft and hard at the same time. His fingers came away dusty as he swiped them over the ground. He lifted them before his eyes and saw a substance trickle off them, frowning at the texture that seemed to be a mix of oil and dust. He watched it drip onto his leg, shivering at the peculiar sensation of cold saturating the patch of skin where the substance had landed. Shaking his hand, Schuldig got to his feet. 

 

_[[Well?]]_

 

Again that voice, coming from everywhere. He turned on his heel and looked, but no matter where he looked he saw the same nondescript darkness surrounding him. There was light only where he stood. Schuldig could not get rid of the feeling that _he_ himself was responsible for that light. 

 

The shadows before him shifted and spat out Farfarello. 

 

Schuldig knew that everyone had a fixed image of their own self in their mind. In the rarest cases, that image matched what the person it belonged to really looked like; everyone was delusional to a certain degree, everyone saw someone more beautiful, more smart, more _liked_ when they looked at the mirror inside. Searching for that inner image was usually the first thing Schuldig did when he took the long dive into a stranger’s mind; it was easy to find weaknesses, desire and wishes that he would normally have to search for, just by looking at the mirror image. 

 

The only apparent difference between the flesh and blood Farfarello and the mirror image Schuldig was now facing was the presence of the left eye. It was disconcerting to have that normally already intense gaze fixed on him from out of two eyes instead of one. He stepped closer to the mirror image, noticing that the light followed him...as though part of Farfarello’s mind was intent on lighting the way for him.

 

Or was it intent on keeping things out of his sight by casting everything else into darkness?

 

Farfarello’s mirror twin chuckled and crossed his arms, glancing to the side. _[[Yeah, here there be monsters.]]_ He glanced at Schuldig out of the corners of his eyes and grinned. _[[Are you happy now? Do you have what you wanted?]]_

 

Schuldig stopped an arm’s length away from him, noting that there indeed were no other _visible_ differences. Even the blood from their fight was still there, flaking off his cheeks and chin. Schuldig looked back over his shoulder and tried to pierce the darkness, but it was solid and impenetrable and very much like the emptiness he had encountered in Aya Fujimiya’s mind all those years ago. He turned back to Farfarello and spread his arms, describing their surroundings with a swipe of hands.

 

_[[This is it? This is what you’ve been keeping from me all those years? This is_ _**all** _ _there is?]]_

 

Farfarello shrugged and nodded. _[[Yep.]]_

 

He looked again. Farfarello was right - there was nothing worth seeing here except for the ever-present shadows. There should have been something, but there was nothing. It was frightening. Everyone Schuldig had touched with his Gift, including himself, including Crawford and Nagi, had a helplessly tangled clutter of memories, thoughts, dreams and wishes in their mindscape, needing more and more space proportionally to the span of years that passed. 

 

To find nothing where he had expected the answers to all of Farfarello’s antics was disappointing and troubling.

 

Unless... 

 

Unless Farfarello was playing him for a fool once more.

 

Walking a few steps, his personal light bubble following him like a loyal dog, Schuldig turned around and fixed Farfarello with an expectant glare. _[[All right. Where is it?]]_

 

 _[[You have to know, don’t you?]]_ Farfarello’s voice was disembodied. Schuldig realized that the mirror twin didn’t move his lips although he mimicked some of the emotion behind the words, brows drawing together, the corners of his mouth turning downward. _[[You can’t leave well enough alone. You can’t let me keep something that is my own.]]_

 

The accusation in the words was hard to miss. Schuldig almost felt sorry as he heard it, knowing on some basic level that Farfarello was right, that he had no justifiable demands to make here. Yet he had been granted access, something denied to him for years. 

 

_[[You let me in this far. Show me everything.]]_

 

The mirror twin sighed, a tired and hollow sound. He shifted his eyes from Schuldig to the shadows surrounding them, and the darkness lifted in a great rush and swirl of colours. Now the real shields dissolved, the process slow and gradual, allowing Schuldig glimpses of what he wanted to see. As though a film of black ink was slowly running from everything around them, he saw the clean walls of a vast hall emerge from the shadows, manifesting bit by bit. 

 

Then there was a bang, as though air had been let out of an enclosed space, and Schuldig stood at Farfarello’s core. He also stood alone; the mirror twin had faded with the darkness. Turning on his heel to take in his surroundings, the first thing he noticed were the pictures hanging on the walls of the hall. 

 

Some of the places and people on those pictures seemed familiar at first glance. The place seemed infinite. Walking to one wall, Schuldig studied a large, framed picture, showing a scene he could not make anything of. A young girl with dark hair, laying on a tiled floor, clutching at something sticking out of her chest, her face forever captured in an expression of fear and pain. 

 

A pencil. Her small fingers were curled around a coloured pencil. He thought he could see a shadow at the edge of the image, as though someone was rushing to help her. 

 

The scene touched something in Schuldig that made him feel uneasy. He stepped away from the framed picture and noticed the small white sign that hung beneath the frame, disclaiming in straight, clean letters a name he didn’t know. Jenny.

 

He took more steps back and laid his head back, seeing that the entire wall was covered with pictures from ceiling to floor. Some of them framed masterpieces, others mere scraps of paper with nothing but a few lines on them; each one had a small sign, telling of a person or an event of Farfarello’s past. 

 

This was the most ordered mind he had ever been in, and knowing that mind belonged to Farfarello was...frightening. 

 

Another image, hanging at eye level, caught his interest. He nearly shrank back as he recognized himself, a very much _younger_ himself, wearing a woollen cap and an oversized army coat, mouth turned downward in a haughty sneer. 

 

The sign beneath this image didn’t have his name on it. He read ‘If it comes down to it, I’ll kill you first’ and closed his eyes, trying to remember any point in time when he had worn a woollen cap and an army coat. Nothing came to mind. 

 

Yet Farfarello remembered it, had even dedicated a fairly large and framed image to it, so it _had_ to have some kind of meaning, no?

 

Schuldig walked on, forgetting time and space as he glanced at other images. He realized that the recent, newer ones hung higher up. But that was where the order ended; there were scenes from their early Schwarz years mixed together with the ambush at the Fish Market, scenes from the Seventh Serpent amid a row of images depicting their dealings with Takatori and their fights with Weiss...

 

There was order, yet there was none. It was chaos that defied its nature.

 

Farfarello was on none of these images. Schuldig looked at a good hundred of them before he realized that none of them showed even a fleeting likeness of his lover. Or did they hang higher up, where he could not reach them?

 

...was not meant to reach them?

 

He sighed, exhaling deeply, and relaxed his shoulders, and extended his Gift. 

 

The shields came down so quickly he ducked out of habit, expecting them to behead him. Yet it was too late - once Schuldig had a foot in the door, there was no way to push him out again. Farfarello seemed to realize that, too. Feeling the air around him begin to hum with anger, the telepath doubled his efforts and created a vortex, sucking the images from the walls, taking their name tags and descriptions right along. 

 

_[[Schuldig.]]_

 

It was different from assimilating the mind of the gangster at the Seventh Serpent. He didn’t want to cause any damage here - hated the very thought of it - and made sure that nothing was actually removed.

 

_[[Schuldig!]]_

 

The anger, visible now like a swarm of crazed hornets, began to push at him to drive him out of this place. He held on with everything he had, recognized the darkness, the glassy membranes that began to come down around him, tight and clinging once more...

 

...and extended mental knives, cutting a great, screeching chunk out of them. 

 

A scream erupted around him. He thought his eardrums were going to shatter and fled, drawing back every last tendril of his Gift he had sent out. Great blooms of red exploded in the darkness; he squeezed through the gap in the shields before they closed and turned around, satisfied to see the bleeding edges of the cut he had made. 

 

Something slammed against his head from the inside out, taking him down into blessed silence. 

 

*********

**January 26 th, 2002, Tokyo**

**1312 Hours**

*********

 

Schuldig woke to chaos and a slideshow of images before his eyes. At first he thought that they were the images he had taken from Farfarello’s mind, but then he realized that the room around him was spinning wildly, affecting his stomach. He felt like throwing up and considered it, the bruise on his brow hammering in time with his accelerated heartbeat. They had somehow made it into Manx’s office after all. 

 

A heavy weight lay on him. He moved his fingers, felt them scrabble against cloth and bare skin, the edge of something hard. A belt. He squinted, saw a mop of ruffled white hair and the string of a black eye patch, and realized that they must have hit the ground when Schuldig created the vortex. Unlikely that such a transgression would go unpunished; his head threatened to shatter into a million tiny pieces as he lifted it, he tasted bile in the back of his throat and blood on his tongue. 

 

A vividly red something suddenly obscured his view, followed by a splash of cold water in his face. Spluttering, Schuldig coughed as it ran into his nose. He yanked his arms out from under Farfarello’s considerable weight and cursed Manx with a string of colourful words. 

 

The chief of police stood bent over them, an empty, dripping coffee cup in one hand, a look of worry mixed with anger on her face. She looked beautiful, flustered like that. Like Jesus, ready to do some nail-pounding of his own. He snickered at the comparison, suspecting that it came from Farfarello’s repertoire, and cursed once more, weakly, as the sound of his own voice dug a few holes into his brain.

 

“Help me get up,” Schuldig croaked at last, “He’s heavy.”

 

Manx pressed her lips together and said nothing. She slammed the cup down on the desk they lay next to and grabbed onto Farfarello’s shoulders, tugging and shoving with Schuldig’s help. Every movement causing his head to erupt in new bursts of pain, the telepath heaved a sigh of relief as he could sit up finally.

 

That relief faded quickly as he looked at Farfarello, who laid motionless, arms and legs spread from his body, a trickle of fresh blood running from his left nostril. Ignoring his own hurts and aches, Schuldig took Farfarello’s head between both hands, kneeling over his chest.

 

_[[ Far? ]]_

 

The cut was still there, though it had stopped bleeding. It reacted with a shiver as Schuldig drew closer, caressing it with his presence. 

 

In the material world, Farfarello’s single eye rolled open, the pupil nearly eclipsing the flat gold of the iris. He blinked up at the telepath for a while, as though he was not really seeing him, and reached up to push Schuldig’s hands away from his head. Schuldig let him and moved away as Farfarello sat up with a small groan. 

 

“What the hell is going on here?” Manx whispered. 

 

Schuldig had almost forgotten about her. Turning to look at her, he managed a weak smile. “Something personal. Could you leave us alone for a few minutes?”

 

She sighed noisily and disappeared out of his field of view, and this time Schuldig had the distinct impression that she _wanted_ him to pick up the feeling of misgiving, worry and anger she was radiating. He wondered again how long Manx and Farfarello had been working together, what he had taught her...or how much of it came from her own talents. 

 

Unbelievable. Here was a low-key psychic, right under their noses, and he had never noticed her as anyone else but the secretary of Kritiker and now, the chief of police. No wonder she had made it this far. Low-key telepathy or empathy did help in her field of work. 

 

Filing the observation away, Schuldig turned to face Farfarello. “I know you’re angry.”

 

Farfarello leaned against the desk, slumped as though he had just fought the hounds of hell. The comparison was not that far of, and again Schuldig suspected he was picking it up from the Irishman. They were for now tangled together in ways beyond the flesh. Licking dry lips, the telepath scooted closer to him, resting a hand on Farfarello’s knee. 

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

“No, you’re not.” Farfarello sighed and turned his head to the side. He reached up and wiped the blood from his nose and mouth, rubbing his hand on his pants. “You’re an asshole, Schuldig. A complete and utter asshole.”

 

The words stung, especially since Farfarello meant every single syllable. “You let me in. You knew what I was going to do.”

 

“No. I didn’t know you were going to...to _assimilate_ me, like you do it with those poor bastards you can glean information from. And you didn’t _stop_ , even when I tried to make you leave.” 

 

There was no sense in explaining to Farfarello that he hadn’t assimilated his memories, merely copied them; the closed-off expression on his face and calculating stare in his eye was all Schuldig needed to see. Schuldig knew that he hadn’t yet fully grasped everything he had set into motion with his doings; just by putting his hand on Farfarello’s knee he thought he could feel every emotion passing through the Irishman, and those were many: confusion, anger, conflicting wants and needs...fear. 

 

“Don’t be afraid,” he said softly, tightening his fingers on Farfarello’s knee. Knowing he was treading a potentially dangerous path, knowing Farfarello could _feel_ him inside, he scooted closer yet, reaching up to pull the Irishman against him. They crumbled into each other, and somehow Schuldig ended up leaned against the desk with Farfarello’s face pressed against his throat once more, the Irishman’s warm breath sending shivers down his spine. He chose his next words carefully. “I didn’t take anything _away_ , Far.”

 

“That’s not an excuse,” Farfarello said, the words coming out muffled against skin. He didn’t protest as Schuldig moved them both, but neither did he participate. Shoulder pressed into the telepath’s chest, head lying in the crook between Schuldig’s neck and shoulder, he just breathed. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

 

All his life, Farfarello had kept carefully constructed barriers between himself and the rest of the world. From touching his mind just once Schuldig didn’t know whom those barriers were meant to protect or what they were supposed to keep out; he knew he had, if not torn them down completely, then at least torn a hole into them, a hole through which he now had unhindered access into the Irishman’s mind. He had no idea if it was permanent. The edges of his cut didn’t bleed anymore, but when he stroked a careful mental finger over them, Farfarello flinched against him as though the touch caused him pain. 

 

He didn’t pick specific thoughts up from the Irishman, just a dull buzzing that had a distinct likeness to what depression felt like in other people. He examined it curiously, this buzzing, until it made way for a sense of finality. Alarmed at the sudden mood shift, Schuldig looked down at Farfarello’s face. The Irishman’s eye was closed but moving behind its lid as though he was dreaming. 

 

“Now we’re even,” Farfarello said at last, the words having the same ring of finality to them. “I betrayed your trust out of necessity. You betrayed mine because you could.”

 

Amazed, Schuldig listened to the echoes of the words as they reverberated through Farfarello’s mind. It was unlike anything he had ever experienced before. It usually took long processes to come to terms with sudden changes in people’s lives, yet Farfarello took a situation, examined it from all sides, and then tried to fit it into his world order as quickly as possible. 

 

No wonder he made such a perfect predator. 

 

He simply adapted to a situation instead of waiting for it to happen the other way around. He would rather completely twist his own way of seeing things than wait for a miracle. Concentrating, Schuldig dipped into his mind, unable to keep his curiosity in check. Through the gap in the Irishman’s shields, he caught a glimpse of the vast hall, undisturbed and hale once more.

 

Like the slots in a lottery machine, the images hanging on the walls of the hall suddenly changed places, rearranging themselves in the order of things, rearranging themselves according to the world as Farfarello saw it. Although Schuldig tried, he didn’t see if a new image was added or an old one replaced or taken away. 

 

He felt a hand at the back of his neck, pulling him down. Slipping out of Farfarello’s mind, he had a split second to find his own place in the order of things again as the Irishman leaned up on his elbow and pressed his lips to Schuldig’s, initiating a kiss that was so careful and searching that Schuldig felt like a teenager experiencing the first heady rush of butterflies in the stomach as their tongues met.

 

 _[[That easy?]]_ Schuldig could not yet believe that it would be, could be that anti-climatic. _[[That is_ _ **all**_ _you’re saying about it?]]_

 

_[[That easy. Not much choice.]]_

 

He knew he would have to get used to that. Though he had wished for Farfarello to respond to his telepathic calls, actually hearing the Irishman’s soft voice inside his head in answer was...exhilarating.

 

He went completely hard at the thought of having sex here, now, with the wound in Farfarello’s mind still open and bleeding and wait, not bleeding anymore, just _open_ , allowing him detailed glimpses of what was going through his Irishman’s head.

 

Schuldig was not going to look a gift horse in the mouth if it galloped right into his life. If all it took for Farfarello to come to terms with this new situation was _adapting_ to it, the telepath was not going to ask questions. 

 

Farfarello tried to pull him down and roll them over but Schuldig was having none of it. He cupped his head and lifted it for another kiss, bleeding some of the lust and exaltation he was feeling in through the gap in the Irishman’s shield, telling himself that he was _not_ manipulating but sharing. 

 

Farfarello shifted against him, moved into a crouch above Schuldig’s lap, and retaliated. The downward grind against his hard cock had him gasping into Farfarello’s mouth. Blindly grasping, Schuldig managed to snag Farfarello’s hands before they crawled under his shirt. He pushed them behind and to the small of Farfarello’s back, breaking the kiss to nip at his collar bone and suck on the small hill of his Adam’s apple. 

 

Jerked as he felt the phantom teeth at his own throat, along with all the pleasure Farfarello felt from it.

 

 _Oh yeah, there is a whole new world waiting to be explored here_ , Schuldig thought giddily. 

 

He raked his teeth along the side of Farfarello’s neck and sucked on the soft skin where neck and shoulder met, keeping his wrists firmly held behind his back although he knew that Farfarello wanted to touch him. He only let go of them as he ran out of skin to kiss and nip, running his hands along his sides and under the soft T-shirt to pull it up and expose Farfarello’s stomach and chest. He left it to him to pull it off completely and sucked on one of the pebbled nipples, shuddering as he felt the path of fire the pleasure took from Farfarello’s chest down to his groin and cock.

 

Distancing himself a little until he was sure that anything he did to Farfarello would not make him come on the spot, Schuldig wrapped his arms around the Irishman’s waist and pushed him onto his back, stretching his arms above his head. 

 

Farfarello smirked as Schuldig picked up the discarded T-shirt and wound it into a tight coil of cloth, then crouched above him and reached for his wrists. “Feeling kinky?” 

 

His voice was rough with anticipation and desire, desire so clear and bright and nearly painful that Schuldig almost caved in on himself as it rushed over him in a wave. He answered, “Feeling you,” and wound the coiled shirt around Farfarello’s wrists, looping the ends around them several times before tying them together. 

 

It was a laughably useless restraint, but Schuldig counted on Farfarello to get the unmistakable hint it entailed. He was not disappointed. The Irishman felt around with both hands until he encountered the solidity of a table leg of Manx’s desk and wrapped his fingers around it. 

 

Perfect. Sometimes it was the very thought that counted. 

 

Schuldig sat back, feeling Farfarello’s hard length press against his ass, and grinned. “You like this.” He was gasping and clutching at the Irishman’s hips a moment later as a rollercoaster of lust and urgency roared over him. Enough to nearly drive him out of his mind, he was left with reeling senses and the suspicion that Farfarello had figured out the advantages of being mind-linked to Schuldig a little too quickly. There was no other explanation for that smug, hard grin sitting in the corner of the Irishman’s mouth. 

 

He felt something else then, and nearly choked on a scream, arching under the sensation. “Bastard!”

 

It was like electricity, moving in slow waves all over his skin, _into_ his skin, into his body. Electricity...or a thousand nimble fingers, relentlessly plugging into his nerve endings, stimulating them. Unable to keep from moving with the sensation, Schuldig caught a brief glimpse of himself through Farfarello’s vision, eyes closed, mouth open and slack, mouth pinched and teeth bared, chest heaving. His back arched sharply as a gentle, hot wave swept through his groin, concentrating on his sweet spot, _staying_ there...

 

...retreating again, leaving him breathless and shuddering on top of Farfarello, exhausted as though he had just had the most taxing bout of fucking in all his life. 

 

And they hadn’t even started yet.

 

The Irishman’s laughter sounded rough in his ears. “Did you know that I never actually laid a finger on Nagumo?”

 

Schuldig wanted to smack him and told him so, only to receive more laughter. Schuldig’s inroad into Farfarello’s mind hadn’t changed anything...

 

...and yet, had changed everything. Schuldig felt both excited and frightened at the same time as he stared down into that single, serene gaze, sensing abysses and pitfalls there he hadn’t seen before. As aware of Farfarello’s Biokinetic power he might have been, he had never seen it in any other circumstance than a violent, controlling one. 

 

He caught the thought just before it drowned in the deep pool of want and need Farfarello felt, and swallowed dryly. 

 

 _You don’t have any real power here. Now. I can do anything I want to you...and make you want more..._

 

He scooted backward and yanked Farfarello’s pants and belt open, pulling them down along with the boxer shorts he wore underneath, and threw the clothes to the side. Stretching lasciviously, the Irishman toed his boots and socks off and spread his legs to give him a good view, still smirking.

 

Schuldig vowed to all gods that were listening that he would wipe that grin off his face. He extended a hand and traced a line from the ‘v’ of Farfarello’s collar bones down over his chest and stomach just to the patch of tightly curled white hair in the delta of his legs. Farfarello’s breath hitched as he continued the line down tender skin to the leaking tip of his erect cock and rubbed his thumb over the ridge of skin there. 

 

Farfarello moved his legs, hooking his ankles in the small of Schuldig’s back, and groaned softly, staring at Schuldig from under lowered lashes. “Take off your clothes.” 

 

They had had sex before, they had seen each other naked - hell, due to their shared past they had seen each other naked before either of them even so much as thought about the other in any sexual way - but now, as he undressed slowly, Schuldig again saw himself through Farfarello’s eye and was anxious to know what he thought. Years and years of seeing himself through everyone else’s eyes had made him self-conscious by default. The mirror often lied yet the eyes of other people were unforgiving and cruel, their judgment harsh. 

 

Farfarello saw himself the way he was, with nothing added or beautified except for the left eye which he was missing in the material world. It was a very realistic way of seeing the world, and one that was nearly unique. Very few people didn’t flatter themselves, didn’t deceive themselves where their physical appearance was concerned. Crawford was one of the few people who saw himself that way. Nagi, on the other hand, didn’t.

 

As he pulled off his pants, he caught the thoughts. “You don’t think I’m beautiful?” He took Farfarello’s cock between his palms and moved closer still, wedging his knees under his thighs, and bent down to recapture the nipple he had abandoned earlier. _[[You liar. I remember what you told me at the bar in Roppongi.]]_

 

The desire to move his hands into Schuldig’s hair quarrelled with the urge to just lie there and enjoy, and Schuldig smirked around the small nubbin between his lips and bit carefully, rubbing both thumbs across the head of Farfarello’s cock. _[[I must punish you for that.]]_

 

He received no answer, only a wordless moan and a roll of hips against his own groin. Giving the nipple a last playful bite, Schuldig sat back up and forced Farfarello’s legs further apart, closing one hand around the root of his cock in a tight grip, and rubbed the palm of his hand over the tip to collect the moisture there before he began to slowly and thoroughly fist him, eyes glued to the Irishman’s face. 

 

Aroused abandonment rarely looked that feral, that tightly contained to him, as it did on Farfarello’s face. Now that he _felt_ it too, it was nearly intimidating. Inhibitions pushed to the side, Farfarello began to move his hips up against Schuldig’s hands, trying to set a faster pace, strained growls and moans flowing from his lips. 

 

He made a rough sound of protest as Schuldig gave a last firm jerk and stopped, pressing his cock up against his belly to lean over him and whisper, “Stay right here.” The look in his eye was unfocused and wild like his thoughts, turning in circles around pleasure, hot, good and _more_. 

 

Schuldig’s knees felt weak as he got to his feet and stalked around Manx’s desk, opening random drawers. She was a woman who took great care of her appearance. There had to be something he could use.

 

He found several make-up items in a bottom drawer, looting around until his fingers closed over a small tube of hand lotion. He also found a pack of condoms and a pair of handcuffs, but he left those alone. Handcuffing Farfarello to a table leg of Manx’s desk might just be asking for trouble, as much as he was tempted. 

 

A low chuckle coming from the floor let him know that Farfarello must have heard that train of thought. Schuldig remembered their open link and clamped down on it as he walked back around the desk, stopping at Farfarello’s side. Having access to his mind was becoming normal too damn quickly. Already he knew that if he lost that access again, he would fight like hell to get it back. 

 

Some of the excitement and arousal had lessened while Schuldig searched for a lubricant; the Irishman had crossed his legs and waggled the toes of one foot, staring up at Schuldig with a devilish grin. “She’s right next door.”

 

Schuldig glanced at the closed door between Manx’s office and the room next to it and shrugged. “She’ll get over it.”

 

If Manx really was a low-key psychic, she would have a good idea of what was going on in here by now, anyway. Schuldig didn’t really give a damn. He wanted to ask her why she had a pair of handcuffs and a box of condoms in a desk drawer, but it could wait.

 

He could not. 

 

That little bit of conversation had dissipated the charged atmosphere, taken some of the urgency away from them both. Schuldig kneeled over Farfarello’s stomach, the tube of hand lotion set to the side, and bent over him for a long, sated kiss. When he pulled back, Farfarello’s eye was bright with want. “Schu...”

 

As if he needed an incentive. His fingers shook as he uncapped the tube and squeezed lotion onto them. He crawled off Farfarello and licked his lips, eyes wandering over the body stretched out before him. “Turn around.”

 

Farfarello rested his brow on his forearms, spread his legs as Schuldig moved into position behind him, and sighed noisily as the telepath wrapped an arm around his waist and pulled him to his knees. The sigh turned into a growl in the back of his throat as Schuldig’s tongue moved over the sensitive stretch of skin behind his balls and circled the ring of muscle between the globes of his ass, teasing it with little stabs and dibs. Schuldig nudged the link between them back to full awareness and felt the same sensation, the same anticipation. He spread the lotion over his hard cock, even that touch enough to nearly bring him to completion, and pushed Farfarello’s knees further apart with his free hand. 

 

He suspected that Farfarello used his Gift to relax the small ring of muscle but was beyond caring as he sank into him on a smooth, quick thrust. Pressure and pleasure shot through him and straight into the pit of his belly, stoking banked fires. He fed the pleasure to Farfarello through the link and received the other man’s feelings in return. 

 

Neither of them would last long under this assault on both a physical and psychic scale; Schuldig reached around Farfarello and caught his cock in a tight, moist grip, jerking him off in time with his thrusts, and felt the pressure in his balls and the tightness of his cock increase. He looked down and watched himself slide in and out of Farfarello’s body, the visual nearly as good as the physical sensation, and came with a barely muffled shout, slamming his hips against Farfarello’s ass, feeling the muscles constrict and tighten around him and the Irishman’s seed run over his fingers.

 

He kept his hand around Farfarello’s cock and fisted him, lotion and semen and sweat fusing their skin together. Farfarello keened at the prolonged stimulation and bucked his hips, then shivered as Schuldig began to pull his softening cock from his body. “Wait.”

 

Muscles aching, Schuldig gasped sharply as Farfarello suddenly sat up, wrists freed from their makeshift restraint. He fell back and sat down on his heels, gripping the Irishman’s hips with both hands as Farfarello settled down on his lap, back pressed against Schuldig’s chest, and laid his head on his shoulder. 

 

Turning his head, lips parting to allow the tip of his tongue to move over the sweaty skin of Schuldig’s neck, Farfarello projected an aura of sated depravity...and a lust for more.

 

 _[[Do you want to kill me?]]_ He kissed the tip of Farfarello’s nose and moved his hands to the Irishman’s sticky cock, stroking, trying to soothe the need Farfarello felt like an itch. _[[It’s too soon.]]_

 

The heated gaze Farfarello gave him made something in the pit of his stomach coil and knot together with equal parts anticipation and dread. Farfarello climbed off his lap and turned around, putting his hands on his shoulders to push him down. Stretching out on the floor, Schuldig blinked at the tight, almost too focused expression on the Irishman’s face; a quick dip beyond the bubbling waves of lust and need revealed...

 

“Oh god. God.” 

 

He arched his back so sharply that only his shoulders and butt remained on the floor, felt the invisible fingers trace along every sensitive patch of skin on his body, turning everything between his nipples and knees into one gigantic, throbbing nerve. His cock hardened once more, and it was painful, but in a good way, and when he saw Farfarello reach for the tube of lotion he closed his eyes and concentrated on the sensation alone. 

 

Cool. Slippery. Farfarello’s hands moved on his sensitized skin with the skill of a painter wielding a brush, spreading more lotion over his straining erection, cradling his balls in his palm, rolling them, carefully squeezing the fragile orbs within. 

 

He was the one to push his hips up into the hands now, sighing with contentment as his cock slipped between Farfarello’s fingers forming a snug tunnel around him. He felt him shift and gritted his teeth in anticipation, lips parting in a wordless, silent moan as Farfarello sank down on him. His hands moved onto the Irishman’s hips, forearms pressed against straining thigh muscles. All of Farfarello seemed to thrum with energy. 

 

Energy intent to drive him out of his mind. His nerves still sang with exhaust and pleasure from their last round, but they answered to Farfarello’s Gift as he extended his reach deeply into Schuldig’s body. The gentle rub of thumbs over his nipples was followed by a ruthless attack on his sweet spot, and Farfarello lifted up and ground himself back down slowly and thoroughly, and gripped him tightly. 

 

Helpless beneath the Irishman, Schuldig was not prepared for the wave. He went down without protest when it came and choked on the raw emotion, the need to own and be owned he felt directed at himself. Despite their link, Farfarello had kept that all carefully hidden in yet another corner of his mind and now revealed it for the telepath. 

 

Schuldig didn’t know if it was an act of defiance or an act of trust; he had no choice, he took it all in, felt it saturate his every pore, his every cell. In the end, cradled securely and possessively in a swamp of emotion, he came so hard he saw stars.

 

Through the link, Farfarello echoed into him. Everything else swept aside, every fight, every circumstance meaningless, Schuldig breathed him in. 

 

Farfarello collapsed on top of him with a groan. It took all the strength Schuldig had left to reach up and wrap his arms around him before he dropped off to sleep so fast he never saw it coming. 

 

\---

 

Distant voices, distant noises, one of them turning into an agitated female voice that shrieked: “In my goddamn office! MY OFFICE! You people have no shame!”

 

He was too tired to deal with anything and tuned the voice out until it became a distant noise once more. 

 

When he finally woke up, still reluctantly, pale red sunlight shone in through the blinds of the window, painting striped shadows onto the floor. He moved his arms and felt every muscle in his body scream in protest as he pulled them out from under his chest, refusing to obey his command.

 

“Far...?”

 

“You owe me a new carpet,” a scathing voice he recognized as Manx’s said from somewhere behind him. “And for God’s sake, put your clothes back on!”

 

Rolling onto his back proved to be hard work as it seemed that his spine had taken a leave of absence, rendering him a sprawling, satisfied heap of telepath. The sunlight warmed him. Something shifted against his skin as he turned around and blinked at the fuzzy outline of Manx sitting on a chair at the far wall. Someone had spread a thin blanket over him. 

 

“Where’s Farfarello?” Even his voice lacked its usual strength and sounded more like a croak. He gripped the blanket and sat up, fighting off a spell of dizziness, leaning against the side of the desk to keep from falling back down right away. A look around the office confirmed his suspicion; Farfarello was nowhere to be seen and his clothes were gone as well. “Don’t tell me he ran off again.”

 

Manx had rolled her desk chair against the door to her office, not the wall, Schuldig realized. How unfortunate and poorly chosen a position! Anyone shooting a few bullets through the door just for fun would hit her square in the back without even having to try that hard. 

 

Blinking - that was Farfarello’s mindset, not his own, although he would have harboured similar thoughts had his mind not insisted on dwelling on the warmth and the sunlight and how good it all felt - Schuldig looked Manx up and down. 

 

She sat with her legs primly crossed, and stared at Schuldig with an expression that bordered between disgust and exasperation. Some when between stalking off to deal with her people and now, she must have slipped into different clothing. The black jumpsuit hugging her curves contrasted so nicely with the red of her hair and gave her an edge. The shoulder holster cradling a semi-automatic looked as though it had been made specifically for this outfit. “No. He’s in the cafeteria and getting food.”

 

Distrusting everything Farfarello said he was going to do had become second nature to Schuldig and would probably never be replaced by pure and unlimited trust, the kind only to be found in movies and romance novels. Dismissing Manx from his attention, the telepath focused inward and sorted through the several minds he perceived inside the precinct, surprised as he only found a handful. He found Farfarello’s and eavesdropped on a rather amusing inner monologue on vending machines and how they were a waste of metal before he caressed those thoughts and made his presence known. 

 

Farfarello felt a little surprised and uneasy at the intrusion on his thoughts, but he overcame those feelings quickly and responded to Schuldig’s question. _[[I’m starving.]]_

 

_[[Aren’t you worried about detection? Walking around in a precinct?]]_

 

_[[We’re safe here, for now. I’ll be back up there in a few minutes.]]_

 

Farfarello tried to emulate the mental caress, the clumsy attempt bringing a smile to Schuldig’s face. He slipped back out of his mind and noticed Manx’s tight expression. “What?”

 

“You people...”

 

“...have no shame? I heard that before.” Just to piss her off a little, Schuldig got to his feet and threw the blanket off, collecting his clothes from the floor. “So have you, I suppose.”

 

Manx looked to the side as he began to dress. “I don’t know what you mean.”

 

“Come on. I didn’t see it before simply because I never thought of it, but there’s no point in keeping it from me now. You’re a low-key Gifted. Empath or telepath, I don’t know yet.” He saw her stiffen at his words and felt for the reaction she didn’t show him...coming up against carefully constructed shields. “Did he teach you that?”

 

A curt nod. Manx glanced at him over the bridge of her nose. “A little. Well, most of it. You have no idea how hard it is to look at people and know what they’re thinking about you...what they want to do with...and to you...”

 

His laughter sounded hollow to his ears. “Believe me, I know exactly how it is. I’ve been raped, seduced and killed a thousand times over in someone else’s mind. Who made the first step? He or you?”

 

“He. This is a work relationship, nothing else. I hope we’re clear on that?”

 

“After what we did here, how can you still ask that question?”

 

Manx looked away once more and murmured something that he knew was an insult. He finished dressing and sat down on the edge of her desk. 

 

Her shields were weak and thin; it would be the work of five seconds to shatter them entirely and take a look at everything she was, wanted and wished for. Farfarello must have given her the same lessons he had received from Crawford back when he joined Schwarz. It was one of the things Schuldig had never understood - why teach someone whose mind was unreachable for any telepath on earth how to shield? Yet Crawford had insisted. 

 

How should they have known that Farfarello had been born with shields that kicked in once the first telepath deliberately touched his mind? Schuldig let his eyes slip shut and called to the memories he had taken from Farfarello, holding that fragment of thought up before them like a piece of a puzzle looking for a match. Almost immediately, an image slid before his inner eyes, showing him and Crawford, staring, a grey, tall building behind them. 

 

There was the woollen cap, there was the army coat. He remembered the day they had gotten Farfarello out of the institution and grinned as Farfarello’s memory provided him with yet another image: chaos in a car, Schuldig, younger but already hard and vicious, with blood flowing from his nose and poison seeping from his eyes. 

 

Oh yeah, that had been fun. Back then he had thought he was losing his touch. Never before had he grabbed for someone’s mind only to have his ‘hands’ slapped back into his own face. 

 

Farfarello had taught Manx to keep her shields open enough to allow any other telepath access to her everyday thoughts and memory, while the rest, the important things, was kept in a deeper, darker place. It had worked well on Schuldig. If she hadn’t given herself away by answering to his call, he never would have guessed. Her telepathy, weak as it may be, probably worked wonders around the people she surrounded herself with every day. 

 

A sharp knock on the door roused him from his contemplations. Manx rolled her chair away and opened, allowing Farfarello inside. The Irishman handed her a Styrofoam cup and a wrapped sandwich and carried the rest of his purchases to the desk. 

 

“How did you sleep?”

 

“Like the dead.”

 

Farfarello grinned and proceeded to remove the cellophane from a sandwich. “Or the truly and well fucked.”

 

“Shouldn’t you be the one to make that statement?”

 

“I’m eating here,” Manx said sharply from her side of the room. “Keep bedroom talk to the bedroom.”

 

Schuldig gave her an innocent look. “Honey, the entire world _is_ our bedroom. We fucked on your goddamn office floor, and now get over it.” Reaching for one of the two cups Farfarello had put on the desk, he opened it and inhaled the scent of freshly brewed coffee. “What did you mean by ‘our people’, Far? We’re in a police station. These are hardly ‘our’ people.”

 

“They’re my people,” Manx clarified. “Two of them are retired Kritiker agents. The rest are cops who used to work on the team dedicated to taking care of Takatori before Weiss took care of him.”

 

“How many people are we talking about, exactly?” Schuldig had counted no more than six, seven minds on his search for Farfarello’s. 

 

“Seven,” Farfarello said. 

 

He gave the Irishman a long look, which was reciprocated with a dead-on stare. “And you let your people be killed at the harbour.”

 

“They were in the way, and their death was convenient.” Unfazed by Schuldig’s sour look, Farfarello ate his sandwich. “No offence, Schu, but if you and Crawford hadn’t intervened and stopped me on my way to Ginza, Eszet might already be history.”

 

“Including you.” Schuldig set the cup down and crossed his arms with a sigh. There was a confrontation waiting to happen here, but he still felt too good to give it much thought. It would certainly come, later. As would a lot of other things. “What exactly do you have planned?”

 

“Eszet are going for another Resurrection. I’m sure you figured that out by now.” At Schuldig’s curt nod, Farfarello continued, “They’re not as stupid as the old Elders. They’re not going to wait for a specific star constellation and they don’t need an audience. What’s sitting in the Takatori Tower now is the core of the new Eszet...and an old score waiting to be settled.” Gazing off into the distance, he leaned against the desk. “They need two things for the ritual to work. The Lazarus Stone...”

 

“...and a Biokinetic. You.” Schuldig didn’t need to search for Farfarello’s intention to know what the Irishman had planned. “This is suicide. If you walk in there with nothing but seven people, you might as well fling yourself from the next high building.”

 

“Not really. All I have to do is go in there and kill one woman. Claudia.”

 

“Claudia Lamont?”

 

“She’s my old school teacher. I know her under a different name. Miss Gooding.”

 

“All right. So she is your old school teacher.” Schuldig gave a shrug. The name Gooding rang a faint bell, but he had heard so many names over the years that he could not assign a face to it. “She’s also a Biokinetic. I don’t see what she has to do with anything, other than being one of the new Elders and thus a major pain in my rectum.”

 

Manx walked around her desk and sat down, opening a drawer. The file she pulled out was thick and looked well-used, with several notes scribbled onto its carton container. She held it out for Schuldig. 

 

As he opened it, he felt Farfarello’s eye on him with something akin to calculation. He could not pick any specific thoughts up from him and after reading the first page of the voluminous file he entirely forgot about it. 

 

*********

**January 26 th, 2002, Tokyo**

**1648 Hours**

*********

 

Crawford still looked pale and drawn and not very happy as he emerged from the elevator on the third floor, Nagi at his shoulder. Schuldig frowned as he saw the stains of fresh blood on the Oracle’s shirt; when he looked at Nagi, he could barely suppress a sound of surprise.

 

The young man was nearly covered in blood. There were large stains on his dark outfit and his tangled hair was stiff with barely dried gore. Even his brow and cheeks were smeared with it. He gave Schuldig a tired, haunted stare and wordlessly slipped past Manx, who gaped after him as he slowly walked along the corridor to the open office door, where Farfarello stood. 

 

Schuldig turned to Crawford and was cut short before he had the chance to say anything.

 

“They ambushed us,” Crawford croaked, his throat working to form the words. He lifted a jittery hand and raked his fingers through his stringy, sweaty hair, eyes briefly resting on Manx before he turned back to the telepath. “They weren’t waiting for us, but they came for us when we were just about to get back here. I Saw it but there was no chance to avoid them.”

 

A telephone rang. Manx gave Crawford a long look and hurried into her office, exchanging a word with Farfarello before she slammed the door. The Irishman looked at Crawford before he slowly walked up to them. Schuldig opened the link between them but received only a slight feeling of worry paired with curiosity. 

 

“Are you sure no one followed you?” He turned to Crawford and reached out to touch his shoulder, drawing back quickly as Crawford hissed in pain. “What happened?”

 

The Oracle laughed hollowly, slowly reaching up to cradle his shoulder - the very same shoulder that had been injured during the shootout in the Seventh Serpent. “I’m sure no one followed us. Nagi took good care of them.”

 

The door to Manx office opened again, Manx sticking her head around it and shouting, “Half of Dogenzaka has been levelled! Every fire-fighter of the city is on the way there!” The telephone rang again. Swearing, Manx slammed the door shut once more. 

 

Crawford chose that exact moment to collapse. 

 

Schuldig caught him before he hit the ground and nearly went down with him, the Oracle’s limp weight pushing him off-balance. Cursing, the telepath looked up in surprise as Farfarello emerged behind Crawford’s shoulder, wrapping his arms around him.

 

They laid Crawford on the floor, Schuldig reaching for the buttons of his shirt to take a look at the damage. The bandage around the gunshot wound had loosened, bloodstained gauze doing nothing to protect the bullet hole that was seeping blood again. Crawford blindly reached up and swiped at him as Schuldig pulled the bandage off, nearly giving him a black eye. 

 

“Where does that bullet wound come from?” Farfarello knelt at Crawford’s other side, frowning down at him. “It’s fresh.”

 

“We had a little intermezzo with a gang called the Bloodhounds at your bar.” Ignoring Crawford’s weak protest, Schuldig ripped the rest of the buttons off as he yanked the shirt open to have a better view. “Shit. That doesn’t look too good.”

 

“The Bloodhounds?” 

 

“Look, I’ll give you the gory details later, okay? Right now I’m a little occupied with making sure Crawford doesn’t die right under my hands.”

 

Farfarello took the biting words with a shrug and scooted around to have a better look at the wound and Crawford’s shoulder. “The shoulder looks dislocated or broken.” He gently rested his fingertips on Crawford’s brow. “He’s feverish.”

 

Schuldig was ready to fire off another rebuttal in light of Farfarello’s running commentary when Crawford suddenly jerked under his hands, his eyes flying open with shock. Alarmed, Schuldig looked at Farfarello, but the Irishman’s eye was closed and his other hand hovered above Crawford’s face as though he was testing for breath. Transfixed, Schuldig watched that hand move to Crawford’s shoulder and slip under it, lifting the Oracle’s upper body off the floor a bit.

 

“What -”

 

Crawford’s shout of pain was loud and short as Farfarello slammed the injured shoulder down against the floor, followed by a loud crack and pop. One of Crawford’s hands flew up and connected with the side of Farfarello’s head, but the punch was uncoordinated and weak and didn’t faze the Irishman. He slapped Crawford’s hand away. “Hold still.”

 

“Fucker,” Crawford growled, apparently back to full awareness. Schuldig looked down at him and saw anger dance in the Oracle’s eyes. “That -” He broke off, stunned into silence, and craned his neck to look at the bullet wound in his shoulder. “That feels good.”

 

“Welcome to the Twilight Zone,” Schuldig muttered, but he watched with fascination how the bullet wound seemed to move on its own before the edges drew back together. Now matter how often he saw it, it was a sight to see every time. 

 

He had no idea how much time passed but picked up a feeling of intense fatigue from Farfarello when the wound closed entirely. _[[Are you okay? Don’t overdo it.]]_

 

 _[[Don’t be such a girl, Schu.]]_ Farfarello sighed and wiped sweat off his brow. _[[I’m fine.]]_

 

As was Crawford. The Oracle remained flat on the floor as Farfarello pulled away, staring back and forth between him and Schuldig, then gingerly patted his shoulder. He sat up without help and scooted around, staring at the Irishman. “Thank you.”

 

Farfarello would have let him die had Crawford not been one of Schuldig’s oldest and best friends. That much was apparent to the telepath as he skimmed his lover’s surface thoughts. 

 

“Don’t mention it.” Farfarello got to his feet, eye lingering on Crawford. “They ambushed you? In Dogenzaka?”

 

“Yes. As I said, Nagi took care of them.”

 

“Was there a woman among them?”

 

“No.” Crawford frowned. “And I don’t think they were trying to capture us. As soon as we stepped out of the building they started firing.”

 

Schuldig looked at the door to Manx’s office. “Is Nagi okay?”

 

“Yeah. He shielded us and crushed them. It was rather bloody. Unfortunately he nearly crushed me too when two of them tried to jump me _before_ he got the shield up.” 

 

“They’re becoming nervous.” Schuldig heard a similar line of thought from Farfarello, knew Crawford thought the same, and stood. “I got some interesting news for you as well. Claudia Lamont.” 

 

“One of the new Elders. What about her?”

 

“She’s the last one to know how to work the ritual. She’s the daughter of Elspeth Gooding-Lamont. Name ring any bells?”

 

Crawford blinked. “One of the original Elders. Good old Elsie the Icy. Wait a second. What are you trying to tell me?”

 

“Isn’t it obvious, Oracle?” Leaning against the wall, Farfarello crossed his arms over his chest and regarded Crawford with a small, hard smile. “The Lazarus Stone has its name thanks to the very specific occurrence of responding to Biokinesis. Whether or not you believe in the Bible doesn’t make any difference - Jesus of Nazareth was one of the first Biokinetics whose name is recorded in history. What do you think Lazarus of Bethany really was after Jesus resurrected him? You can’t bring anyone back from the dead. At least not the way they were.”

 

“You’re saying that Lazarus of Bethany was a...zombie?” Crawford’s eyebrows nearly hit his hairline. 

 

“More or less. He had been buried at a specific place, his essence hadn’t yet had the time to disperse, and his death was recent. Bringing him ‘back’ was easy.” Farfarello looked at the floor and continued in a monotone voice, “The Lazarus Stone is a...lens, if you so will. It works two ways. You can send power through it...or pull power back _into_ it. It’s old, older than the Bible, but because Jesus of Nazareth already was such a scream back then the stone got its name at that place. It was never cut from the stone of anyone’s grave. Jesus carried it with him. Of course, because they couldn’t explain it, the people back then made it into this whole religious happening that never took place in reality.

 

“Lazarus of Bethany was nothing but an ordinary human with a power that didn’t do him any good because it got twisted by another Gifted. It must have been cruel for those around him to watch him fall apart day after day. Come on, think about it - someone is brought back from the dead and then never mentioned again? In a book like the fucking Bible? That’s why Eszet needed a Biokinetic for the Resurrection to work. Our bodies work differently than everyone else’s thanks to our Gift...we don’t age if we set our minds to it. I can stop myself from growing older simply by _renewing_ myself time and again.”

 

Schuldig had a vision; he saw himself, old and grey, standing bowed and dying next to Farfarello who still looked young, was young, would forever _be_ young. The thought was cruel, yet he knew that it could very well be reality. Wrapping his arms about himself, Schuldig looked to the side and swallowed. “Pulling a Highlander on everyone else.”

 

He felt Farfarello gaze rest on him and looked up. Specifically _not_ touching his thoughts, Schuldig nevertheless had the impression that the Irishman didn’t like that idea too well. Shaking the vision, he waved a hand. “Sorry. Go on.”

 

“Schuldig, who _wants_ to live forever? Watching everything else wither away and die...” Gently shaking his head, Farfarello sighed. “Biokinesis is a quirk of nature. It’s a Gift that’s not supposed to be. It’s also hereditary, more so than any other Gift.”

 

Crawford said, “Eszet had a few studies that explained our Gifts as nothing but energy poled differently. I read them.”

 

So had Schuldig. “I remember those. They said that some people are just more...open toward those energies thanks to genetic defects. Or rather, thanks to genetic ‘antennas’, which could be passed on down the generations like a hair colour.”

 

“Whichever the case...my father was a Biokinetic. He passed his Gift to me. As did Elspeth Gooding onto her daughter, Claudia.” Farfarello leaned his head against the wall. “Someone in the Fujimiya family must have been a Biokinetic, too, maybe one of the parents, maybe someone a few generations back. Hence, Aya Fujimiya’s ‘agelessness’.”

 

“All right,” Crawford muttered, rubbing his temples, “So working the ritual with an ordinary human or even an ‘ordinary’ Gifted won’t do because the...spirit, soul, whatever you want to call it, affects the body?”

 

“Is affected _by_ the body, too,” Farfarello nodded. “If they had resurrected their leader, this Freak, into you or Schuldig, anyone could kill him with a simple gunshot. Pretty unreliable if you ask me, considering you can also die from old age, which is another thing. There’s a good chance that resurrecting the Freak into someone normal will result in this person aging rapidly to match the _age_ of the soul. This is not the case with a Biokinetic. Like I said, I can stop myself from aging. You’re also affected by other Gifts. I am not.”

 

_[[You’re not?]]_

 

 _[[Shut up, Schu.]]_

 

The telepath grinned at the dirty look in his direction and kept smirking even as Crawford noticed the silent exchange, frowning back and forth between him and Farfarello. 

 

“They _need_ a Biokinetic,” Farfarello went on. “Anyone else is just a waste of time and effort and too much of a risk. But they’re also not willing to sacrifice their own, so they go looking for others. With Aya Fujimiya out of the picture, I’m the only one left they know about. Eszet is falling apart. The new Elders _need_ to have their ‘great’ leader now, to show all those Gifted who are running away from them that there _is_ power at the core, and not out there in the wide world. And if that won’t work...the Freak in a Biokinetic’s body...”

 

“Armageddon,” Crawford said. Then he eyed Farfarello suspiciously. “How come you know all this?”

 

“I had five years to find it out.”

 

“All right.” The Oracle scratched at his brow and shrugged. “So we need to kill the new Elders and keep the Ritual from taking place.”

 

Schuldig snorted. He laughed at the looks Crawford and Farfarello sent him and shrugged. “Sorry. It’s just a little hard to swallow that we’re trying to save the world as we know it. Five years ago we tried to destroy it.”

 

\---

 

“You look like shit,” Manx said, looking up at Crawford as he walked into the chief of police’s office.

 

“She’s on our side,” Farfarello said.

 

Crawford said, “I don’t care. Just tell me who I have to shoot.”

 

Schuldig, sitting on the floor next to Nagi, rolled his eyes at all three of them. “One happy family.”

 

“Can’t you all just SHUT THE FUCK UP?”

 

Nagi’s scream was followed by a rumble around them. The entire precinct seemed to shiver and shift before the stone and cement settled down again, like a big cat stopping to purr. Schuldig, who had skimmed Nagi’s surface thoughts since he walked back into the office and sat down next to the silent young man, cast him a worried look. “Calm down.”

 

“I _am_ calm,” Nagi turned eyes nearly black with boiling anger on the telepath and clenched his hands on his knees. He had chosen a corner of Manx’s office and simply collapsed there, refusing both the coffee and sandwich Schuldig offered him. “Just...just shut up, all of you.”

 

From Nagi’s thoughts, Schuldig picked up a feeling of fatigue, restlessness and slowly disintegrating patience. There was also anger and anxiety, directed at no one in particular. The last few days had been taxing for all of them. Nagi wanted to smack Farfarello into the next wall for putting them all through this, a notion Schuldig understood too well. 

 

“Let me introduce the others to you,” Manx said after a while, eyes resting on Nagi’s quiet form. He looked so young. “He can take a nap up here. It’s safe.”

 

Manx would probably never say it out loud, but she had distinctly maternal urges toward anyone looking that young. It was this maternal instinct that had driven her to protect Weiss to the limits of her power. They had all been so young, too. Schuldig got back to his feet, feeling oddly touched. The more he got to know about her, the more he liked her. She had always just been that red-haired woman on the other side to him, not an ally. 

 

He blinked, realizing those were not his thoughts. They came from Farfarello, or rather, from that which he had picked up from Farfarello’s mind. Slipping his arm through the Irishman’s as they filed out of the office behind Manx, he leaned over and whispered, “You like her? Should I be jealous?”

 

Farfarello knew what he meant and grinned. “Pity she doesn’t have a cock.”

 

“There are always strap-ons...” 

 

“Get your mind out of the gutter.” One of Farfarello’s hands strayed down to Schuldig’s ass, giving a firm squeeze. “Before I really start thinking about it.”

 

Schuldig found himself checking to see if Farfarello thought about it.

 

They took the elevator down the ground floor. On the way there, Manx told them that almost every precinct of the city had sent its people to Dogenzaka, the district of Tokyo Nagi had nearly razed to the ground according to her words. The officers normally stationed here were all at the Tsukiji Fish Market, trying to make light of the damage there. 

 

Schuldig sent Crawford an inquiring glance as he listened to her and received a mental snapshot that made his eyes widen. Abandoned apartment buildings at Dogenzaka’s west end, crumbling under an invisible fist slamming down on them, creating giants clouds of dust and debris that rose to the sky as though an angry god had stamped his foot. Explosions - old gas lines erupting and catching fire as metal stroked sparks - and screams - and nothing between him and the chaos out there but a thin, flimsy shield made of pressure...

 

No matter how often he witnessed the result of Nagi’s Gift at work, it always intimidated and made him glad that he was not on the receiving end of the Telekinetic’s wrath. 

 

Not yet, anyway. Nagi’s thoughts had revealed more anger than was good for anyone, directed at everything and everyone who he deemed responsible for the mess his life had turned into. 

 

Everyone included Schuldig and Farfarello, with the Irishman taking the top position. Schuldig could not blame Nagi. The only reason why _he_ hadn’t killed Farfarello yet was that he was madly in love with him.

 

Still, if the situation was not resolved soon, they would be at each other’s throat. Crawford was rattled enough to laugh at everything. The Oracle had quietly decided for himself to simply go along and point his gun at the next best target they told him to shoot; anything beyond that was beyond Crawford’s abilities now. He was falling apart at the seams, the only _lasting_ element in his world the sorrow and rage over his daughter’s and wife’s death. Everything else was slowly fading away into formless shapes on the edge of his awareness. 

 

Farfarello was not driven by rage or sorrow, but by a deadly, focused desire to do away with Eszet, and especially Claudia Lamont. Its roots lay somewhere in Farfarello’s childhood, yet Schuldig had no interest in digging through layers and layers of memory now. He was too fascinated by the driven intent behind it all. Knowing about it now explained much of what Farfarello had been doing lately. As little as the idea of martyrdom appealed to Schuldig, he knew Farfarello was ready to take Eszet down with little concern toward his own person. Everything else was secondary to the Irishman. 

 

Almost everything. Schuldig smiled as he looked at the pictures in Farfarello’s mind and saw the warmly golden glow surrounding each picture that showed him. It was so sweet it was nearly sickening. 

 

Then he received a wave of emotion from Crawford, who watched their tangled fingers and the way they stood so close together with something approaching jealousy, and nearly reeled from the intensity of it all. Farfarello made a sound in the back of his throat as he felt Schuldig jerk, but the telepath gently shook his head and told him to be quiet.

 

Farfarello glanced at Crawford, back at Schuldig, and gave a mental nod.

 

He had always thought Crawford to be the one whose clean and calm outward appearance matched his insides no matter what situation, yet Crawford was a walking wound now, bleeding from too many cuts and bruises. Schuldig felt hurt just by _looking_ at the Oracle. Such a fucking waste. When this was over and they survived, Crawford would be a broken man with nothing to fall back on but painful memories.

 

He was still deep in thought when they walked out of the elevator and only came out of it when he felt several curious glances fixed on him. The seven men who stood in the precinct’s cafeteria were dressed in nondescript street clothing and wore shoulder holsters like Manx. They stared at Crawford’s bloody shirt, yet being who they were they asked no questions; from a light skim across their minds, Schuldig picked up concern toward Crawford’s usefulness. 

 

He noticed something else. Shields. Not quite the shields a Gifted could put up, but he found that the images of children one of the men was running through his mind were quite effective. Another thought of walls of ice and smoke. They would never stop a Telepath but certainly throw them for a loop.

 

“When do you plan on going in?” One of them asked in heavily accented English, a tall, grey-haired Japanese man with glinting eyes. 

 

“Tonight.” Farfarello sat on the edge of a table, arms crossed. “The plan hasn’t changed. We just got more men.”

 

Again Schuldig felt eyes rest on him. Two men, standing a little apart from the other five, were frowning at him. “Remember me?”

 

“Yeah. Odd to see you on our side.”

 

He laughed. “I could say the same.”

 

They grinned, hard and cold. Schuldig liked them. They were men who would stab him in the back without thinking twice about it, if ordered. They looked at Farfarello and saw someone they would kill in a second if he hadn’t been on ‘their’ side, too. They were in this for their collective goal, not for the company, which made them better soldiers than any loyal underling could ever be.

 

Farfarello made a sweeping gesture at the small group and said, “These are the Cadwallader.”

 

 _[[ What does that mean, anyway? ]]_ Schuldig asked.

 

 _[[ War leader. ]]_ The Irishman smiled thinly at Schuldig as he turned away from the assembled. _[[ My army. ]]_

 

_[[ Army? Damn. I still think you shouldn’t have had all your people killed at the harbour. ]]_

 

A seven-man army of retired cops and Kritiker agents. A chief of police whose telepathic Gift was laughably weak. A grief-riddled Oracle in a bloodstained shirt. A telekinetic close to a nervous breakdown. An Irishman who might just be out of his mind after all.

 

And one lovesick telepath.

 

They were going to go down so quickly they would not even leave a smear on the pavement of history. 

 

*********

**January 26 th, 2002, Tokyo**

**1750 Hours**

*********

 

The floor plan was so large that it covered nearly the entire wall of Manx’s office from floor to ceiling. Without its imposing glass façade and surrounding smaller buildings to further make it look taller, the Takatori Tower was nothing but an assembly of lines and indecipherable construction instructions. Schuldig didn’t know how Farfarello and Manx had gotten a hold of the plan. The old Takatori had guarded his tower’s many secrets like a dragon guarded its gold; there had been rumours among the many thousand secretaries and office workers, secrets Schwarz had inevitably learned of due to one sneaky telepath. Takatori had had everyone who helped build the tower killed as soon as the construction was finished. 

 

The old shark had never dealt well with anyone being in the know about his secrets, Schuldig thought as he studied the floor plan, which was why Takatori had never fully trusted Schwarz. A sharp grin stole over his face as he imagined Takatori rolling over in his grave if he knew that Farfarello of all people now knew about all the nooks and crannies in the old man’s dreams. 

 

Crawford stepped into Schuldig’s line of view and studied the floor plan for a moment. He spoke without turning back to the assembled. “Just so I get this straight: The twelve of us are going to approach the Takatori Tower at midnight. Manx, Nagi and I will create a diversion and occupy the guards that undoubtedly will be there, while the...Cadwallader go in through the air duct system and plant the bombs. At the same time, Schuldig and Farfarello will go up through said air duct system and the tunnels Takatori had holed into his stronghold, and deal with the Elders. The entire operation will take place in exactly forty minutes.”

 

“That’s the plan.” Farfarello sat on a chair in the corner of the office, a cup of coffee cradled against his chest. “You are free to object to it.”

 

“You mean to tell me that I am free to butt the hell out of it,” Crawford accused mildly as he turned around. Schuldig knew the expression on his face and prepared for the inevitable discussion. He was not surprised as Crawford switched to English. “Forty minutes to find our way through a maze of tunnels and air ducts to the basement of the Takatori Tower, forty minutes to plant twenty small bombs in crucial places upholding the general stability of the tower, and then to plant one more that will bring it down -”

 

“Crawford,” Farfarello rose from his seat and handed the coffee cup to the man sitting on the floor next to him. “You -”

 

The Oracle would not be interrupted. “Forty minutes to draw attention to us and _survive_ the attention of the guards, some of which will undoubtedly be _Gifted_ , forty minutes to let Schu and you get up to the Elders...” He shook his head. “You’re not insane, Farfarello, you’re stupid. I don’t know how you plan to survive this.”

 

“I don’t plan on dying.” Farfarello had crossed the office and stood at Schuldig’s side, close enough for their shoulders to brush. “I know I can manage in my own time.”

 

Crawford’s smile was cold and vicious. “And what about us? Can you say the same for Schu? For Nagi?” He pointed at the seven men gathered along the far wall. “For them?”

 

“I can speak for myself, Crawford,” Schuldig said softly, the words so low they barely seemed to reach his friend. “I’m here of my own free will. So are they.” 

 

“And so am I,” Manx said from her side of the room, where she had been leaning against the door. She approached the desk, ignoring Schuldig’s warning glance, and continued, “We’ve worked long and hard for this moment, Crawford.”

 

“Butt out,” Crawford said sharply.

 

“I am _part_ of this. If you don’t want to be part of it, why are you here?”

 

Schuldig went into the Oracle’s mind the second Manx stopped talking, ready to intervene in case the violent anger he saw there threatened to overtake Crawford’s rational thinking. The telepathic smack that made Crawford recoil as much as a physical one would have came as a surprise. Crawford took a step back and stared, hard, at the diminutive woman.

 

Radiant in her anger, Manx clenched her hands into fists. From the intensive glare directed at Crawford, Schuldig knew that she was communicating telepathically with the Oracle. Eavesdropping on a normal train of thought was easy; eavesdropping on another telepath’s directed communication was hard, but Schuldig had experience in the matter. Manx was not a very powerful telepath to start with. He wedged himself into the heated exchange and caught the tail end of what must have been a tirade. 

 

 _[[ ...too fucking stubborn to give in! Why are you still here if all you can do is object to everything? We’ve been planning this for months now and we’re going to go through with it, with or without you. If you can’t take the heat, stay out of the goddamned fire! ]]_

 

Anger helped Manx focus and direct her telepathy. Just listening to the heated words gave Schuldig a slight headache; this was the first time in years that he was in the presence of another telepath, and the different, sharper quality of the words were like a shock to his system. He withdrew quickly and concentrated on Crawford, ignoring Farfarello’s mounting annoyance. 

 

Crawford seemed shell-shocked. The frozen expression on his face didn’t change as Manx switched back to normal communication and spoke under her breath, “This isn’t your operation, Crawford. You’re not the one calling the shots around here, so either give in or stay the fuck out.”

 

Wondering how much of Farfarello’s aversion to Crawford had bled over to Manx over the time of their cooperation, Schuldig raised his hands...and then dropped them again. 

 

Manx was right, and he was tired of intervening. 

 

Crawford’s eyes were cold, and even without reading his thoughts Schuldig could pick up the distinct bitterness in them, but the telepath turned from them both, taking a hold of Farfarello’s wrist to pull him out of Manx’s office. He threw a look back over his shoulder as the door closed and saw Crawford staring at Manx, but whatever the Oracle said was lost to his ears as Farfarello pulled him into a tight embrace and pushed him against the wall next to the door. 

 

“He’s falling apart,” the Irishman whispered into Schuldig’s neck, nuzzling the side of his throat, “And he knows it.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“We can’t allow for him to endanger this plan.” The nuzzling became a lick, starting at the base of his throat and teasing the hollow beneath his Adam’s apple. “If he becomes too much of a risk, he has to stay here. We only have this one chance.”

 

Was there a hint of smugness, of relief in Farfarello’s voice? Schuldig sighed and closed his eyes. “I know.” 

 

What they were going to do didn’t sit well with Schuldig, yet he had agreed to it. He knew he would not be able to stop Farfarello. Staying with him during the operation was the only chance he had to _stay_ with him. Tightening his arms around the Irishman, Schuldig sought for the link between them, finding it as a pulsing vein that connected them like an umbilical cord. It was not a bond by any stretch of the imagination - too fragile, far too fragile - but it was there, giving Schuldig something to lose himself in for a short period of time. 

 

 _[[ You don’t have to come with me, either,_ ]] Farfarello said into the link, as though he could feel Schuldig’s searching for it, _[[ The risks... ]]_

 

 _[[ Don’t go all caring and motherly on me, ]]_ Schuldig said, a hint of annoyance seeping through. _[[ I’ve made my choice. I’m not letting you out of my sight again. ]]_

 

_[[ Who’s the one being caring and motherly now... ]]_

 

Schuldig socked him in the shoulder, unable to hide a grin. “You unearth all my deepest and darkest secrets...”

 

“What, like there’s a mushy and sappy side to you, after all?”

 

“That coming from you...”

 

“Oh, shut up.” Farfarello leaned back, framing Schuldig’s face with both hands, and pecked him on the tip of the nose. “As I said, I don’t plan on dying. If no one else fucks up, I won’t. All I have to do is kill one woman. With Claudia Lamont dead, at least the risk of another Resurrection is gone.”

 

“One woman who’s a Biokinetic like you,” Schuldig reminded him. “One woman who knows what you are and what you can do and whose powers might just match yours bit by bit. That’s gonna be an interesting fight, to say the least.”

 

“Leave that to me.” Another peck, this one lingering on responsive lips, and Farfarello tilted his head and slid his tongue into Schuldig’s mouth. _[[ Leave Claudia to me... ]]_

 

He had wondered before about Farfarello’s fixation on Claudia Lamont, but now seemed not a good time to ask, and with Farfarello’s tongue gently and thoroughly mapping familiar territory, Schuldig gladly let his eyes slide shut again and concentrated on the kiss. It lasted until Manx slammed the door open and announced, “Crawford’s going to stay behind.”

 

*********

**January 26 th, 2002, Tokyo**

**1820 Hours**

*********

 

Snow covering the rooftops of the surrounding buildings added brightness to the stale light pouring in through the small window of the deserted office. Crawford’s skin looked ashen in this light, light that made the hollows beneath his eyes all that more prominent, light casting grey shadows into his hair. Sitting on a chair in front of the window, the Oracle looked more like an old man than the fierce, dedicated leader Schuldig had known for years. 

 

To see Crawford like this hurt on more levels than Schuldig wanted to think about. He quietly closed the door, eyes on the Oracle, and crossed the office to stand at Crawford’s side. Fingers playing with an unlit cigarette, he counted the minutes that passed as they looked out of the window at the bright snow. Though Tokyo’s hectic streets were not far below the office, to Schuldig it seemed as if they lived on an island of silence, a bubble in time reserved just for him and Crawford. 

 

He finally lit the cigarette, careless toward the ash drifting onto the carpet. Somehow, the sex with Farfarello had helped healing the bruise on his brow, but not fully. He still felt it when he frowned, a residual tingling of nerves that insisted on feeling a wound that was not there anymore. Glancing at Crawford’s shoulder he wondered if the Oracle felt the same. 

 

Or did his nerves sing an entirely different song? 

 

Another minute passed.

 

“You know what pisses me off the most?” Crawford asked softly, then.

 

“What?” More ash onto the carpet, followed by the smell of singed fibres. 

 

“I found another Schwarz after I left. It wasn’t strong enough. I thought it would be, but I was wrong.”

 

Schuldig didn’t know what to say and nodded. The cigarette was nearly burned down to the filter. It was his last one. “Crawford...”

 

“Then I went back to the old Schwarz only to find out that I wasn’t strong anymore, either.”

 

“Crawford.” There was no ashtray in the small office, only a desk and a chair. Schuldig opened the window and flicked the butt out onto the street below, watching its descend while he felt Crawford’s eyes burn twin holes into his back. “We’re leaving at eleven o’clock in the night. I’d like you to come with us.”

 

“So I lose it and make a complete ass of myself?” Crawford snorted. “Give me a break, Schu. I’ve been falling apart at the seams for days. I’m not _that_ far gone not to see that I wouldn’t be of much help there.”

 

Schuldig turned around, leaning against the wall next to the window. The tone of defeat in Crawford’s voice made him angry. “Stop wallowing in your grief.”

 

“It’s all I have left.” Crawford shrugged. “I didn’t come here to find anything. I came here after I lost _everything_.” 

 

His face, when he looked up at the telepath, appeared naked, stripped of all defences Schuldig was used to seeing in what he knew as calculating eyes. Now those eyes were blank and bloodshot. 

 

Schwarz had always been one of Eszet’s best teams simply due to their unique nature. Few other teams had managed to stay alive in their murderous business for as long as they had; the fact that even after their disbandment all of them were still alive spoke for itself. 

 

Taking Crawford, who was indeed short of falling apart, with them on their final ‘assignment’ was folly, yet Schuldig could not deal with leaving him behind either. They had fought too many battles side by side. Schuldig could not help Crawford with the internal battle he was losing, but...

 

“Then you have nothing left to lose.” Resting a hand on Crawford’s shoulder, Schuldig gave a firm squeeze. “Come with us. As backup. To see it all go down one last time.”

 

He didn’t need to explain that it might as well be them who went down, but in a certain light, from a certain angle, and with the right mindset to go along with it, none of them had anything left to lose. Crawford cracked a wry grin and shook his head, but Schuldig heard him laugh as he walked out of the office. 

 

Farfarello was waiting outside, arms crossed, an expectant expression on his face. “Well?”

 

“Fifty-fifty. He stays in there and goes insane, he goes with us and...”

 

“...goes insane and dies there.” Farfarello sighed and turned down the corridor, waiting until Schuldig caught up to him. “Nagi is asleep. Manx and the Cadwallader are going over the floor plan one last time.” Slipping his arm around Schuldig’s waist, Farfarello leaned into him and nudged him with his nose. “We should get some rest, too.”

 

There was no doubt that Farfarello had already forgotten about Crawford, now that he showed weakness. Though Schuldig knew that it as natural as breathing to the Irishman, he still had to get used to the thought that it was one of them, one of Schwarz, who would be left behind this time.

 

*********

**January 26 th, 2002, Tokyo**

**1900 Hours**

*********

 

Newscasters ran the story about half of Dogenzaka being turned into a gigantic dust and debris field on all channels. After a mere half an hour, Schuldig had enough of it. He switched off the television and cast the remote control to the side, sighing nosily as he leaned back in the cheap leather couch. Given the narrowness of the couch, his thigh inadvertently brushed against one of Farfarello’s feet. Farfarello muttered something in his sleep and curled up. 

 

He had fallen asleep the second his head hit the couch, giving Schuldig an inkling on how long he had been running on adrenaline alone. Not counting his brief fling with unconsciousness during their stay at the house outside of Tokyo, Schuldig doubted Farfarello had had a decent night’s rest in quite some time. 

 

If they survived tonight, they could sleep all they wanted, in any bed anywhere on the world. Schuldig had already made up his mind that once this was over and done with, he would never set foot in Tokyo again. Even good old Germany sounded better than Tokyo. Maybe Farfarello would find interest in the rotting beauty of Venice or Rome, too. 

 

Schuldig closed his eyes and relaxed, trying to find the rest Farfarello had so easily succumbed to, but sleep would not come no matter how long he waited for it. He had had to wait for a lot of things in his life, but he would never have thought that he could not wait for what could possibly be his end. 

 

He was out of cigarettes, too. 

 

What if Eszet knew what they were up to? What if they were waiting for them as well, now, sitting in the Takatori Tower like spiders, fangs poisoned and nets ready? 

 

His eyes slid open again, losing focus as he spread his awareness through the rooms beyond the walls. Manx and the Cadwallader - it was hard to think of them as anything but the ‘army’ Farfarello said they were - sat around Manx’s desk, sipping strong, sweet coffee. Schuldig listened to their dimmed conversation for a while, paying attention to Manx’s mood. Smiling when she noticed him. 

 

With a little training, Manx could be brought up to passable standards. She would be a far cry from the telepaths Eszet had in their ranks; she would never reach Schuldig’s levels simply because Manx was already too old to learn an entirely new way of using power. 

 

_[[ What do you want? ]]_

 

Grinning, Schuldig answered, _[[ Just eavesdropping a little ]]_ before he withdrew again. 

 

Bored and restless once more, Schuldig sighed and rubbed both hands over his face. If he didn’t find something to do soon, he would go insane in those four hours. He spent the next few minutes watching Farfarello sleep, even contemplated poking the link, but...

 

Farfarello sighed and turned over onto his back, opening his eye to blink sleepily at Schuldig. “Stop making such a racket.”

 

“Did I wake you?” Schuldig smirked and leaned over, covering Farfarello’s body with his own. Now that the Irishman was awake, he had someone to talk to, even if it was just for a few minutes. “I can’t sleep.”

 

“I noticed.” Arms wrapped around Schuldig’s middle, Farfarello made a soft sound in the back of his throat. “There’s nothing to do now but wait.”

 

“I hate waiting.”

 

“I know. You were always so restless before an assignment. Still are.”

 

“This isn’t an assignment.” Rubbing his nose against Farfarello’s cheek, noticing the soft stubble there, Schuldig laid his head down on his chest and stared at the black screen of the television. “It’s not going to be the same.” 

 

He thought about Crawford slowly losing it, about Nagi teetering closer and closer to a nervous breakdown, and wondered where he fit in. All things considered he was calm, inwardly, his outward restlessness the result of having nothing to do, something Schuldig had never dealt well with. “When we’re done and we survived, where do you want to go?”

 

A soft chuckle vibrated between them while Farfarello stroked Schuldig’s hair, making the telepath feel like a treasured pet. He had hated feeling that way while on the receiving end of Eszet’s special attention, but feeling it from Farfarello made him happy. “I don’t know yet. There’s the bar, there are the connections...”

 

Schuldig lifted his head. “You want to _stay_ here?”

 

“I haven’t thought that far.”

 

Of course. Leave it to Farfarello, whose five-year-plan would be brought to fruition tonight, to not have thought about what came after. “How about Europe? Have you ever been back to Europe?”

 

“I’d like to see Europe again.”

 

“With me?”

 

“With you.”

 

“We sound like an old married couple, just less psychotic.”

 

“You think married couples are psychotic?” The hand in Schuldig’s hair stilled. 

 

“Of course. We don’t grow older, we just get meaner each year.” Snickering, Schuldig poked Farfarello in the ribs. To sound like a total lunatic was better than being bored out of his mind and having nothing to do. It beat staring at the ceiling by leagues. “Have you never noticed how old couples are so very alike that it’s almost scary?”

 

“Can this conversation get any more surreal? I don’t spend enough time around old married couples to notice these things.”

 

Mock-pouting, Schuldig sighed dramatically. “You didn’t spend enough time around _any_ kind of couples to notice these things.”

 

“You can choose the rings once we survived tonight.” The amusement in the Irishman’s voice spoke volumes as he gently tugged on a few strands of Schuldig’s bright hair. “And now sleep before I conk you with a mallet.”

 

“You don’t have a mallet.”

 

“I can also just punch you in the face until you pass out.”

 

Snorting into the soft cloth of Farfarello’s shirt, Schuldig obediently closed his eyes and listened to the calming, even beat of the Irishman’s heart. Sleep certainly came easier snuggled up against someone.

 

*********

**January 26 th, 2002, Tokyo**

**2128 Hours**

*********

 

He had the gun out and trained on the fuzzy outline of Manx bursting through the door before he was fully awake, and nearly shot her out of a sudden and vicious need for revenge when she slapped the light on. “What the fuck?”

 

“They’re returning from Dogenzaka,” the chief of police hissed, “We have to get to the cars _now_.”

 

Two large vans were parked in an underground garage a block away from the police station, loaded, as far as Schuldig knew, with all they needed for the imminent operation. 

 

He slammed the gun back into its holster and rolled off Farfarello, giving Manx a curt nod. Farfarello, blinking sleep from his eye, sat up and stretched. “What time is it?”

 

“Half past nine. I just got confirmation that the first squad cars are on their way back here,” Manx said. She stood by the open door and kept looking down the hallway outside. “I have to stay here. I’ll meet you later.” 

 

Schuldig got to his feet. “I’ll get Crawford and Nagi.”

 

Manx’s voice followed him down the corridor. “Crawford? I thought he was going to stay here?”

 

“Maybe, maybe not.” 

 

Nagi was already awake as Schuldig walked into Manx’s office. The young man had rested enough for some of the manic gleam to fade from his dark eyes; he gave Schuldig a long look as the telepath entered but didn’t say a word. Sandwich wrappings and empty Styrofoam cups littered Manx’s desk. An overflowing ashtray sitting in the middle of the mess gave Schuldig an insane urge for a cigarette.

 

“We have to move. The cops are returning to the precinct.”

 

“I know. I overheard Manx’s phone call.” Nagi rose from his chair, running a hand through stiff, dirty hair. “Looks like we’ll be going for the big bang a little earlier than planned, huh?”

 

“The day something works _according_ to plan I’ll throw a party. Where’s Crawford?”

 

“Through the door.” 

 

He left Nagi to putting his jacket back on and opened the door to the room next to Manx’s office, sliding his hand along the wall on the search for the light switch. Another’s hand was faster than his. The harsh neon light flooding the room cast stark blue shadows into Crawford’s hair. They stared at each other for a moment. Schuldig was glad to see that some of the old fire was back in the Oracle’s eyes while most of the despair seemed to have bled out of him during the last few hours. 

 

Crawford wore a bullet-proof vest over his sweat-stained shirt. Hair as dirty as Nagi’s, sleeves rolled up and pants wrinkled, he looked more dangerous than ever. “I’m ready.”

 

Schuldig smiled approvingly. “I can see that.”

 

The Cadwallader had assembled in the corridor, grouped around Manx and Farfarello like a pack of wolfhounds. Manx was speaking quietly and quickly to the Irishman. “I need an hour to wrap up the reports and deal with everything else. I’ll meet you at the appointed place.”

 

Farfarello nodded. “All right.” Turning to the others, he said, “Two teams. We’ll do some driving around. New meeting time is half past eleven. Go.”

 

“It still throws me for a loop when I see him do that,” Crawford muttered quietly at Schuldig’s side. “So...”

 

“Sane?”

 

“Organized.” 

 

In less than two minutes, Manx and the Cadwallader had vanished down the corridor toward the front of the precinct. Schuldig, Crawford, Nagi and Farfarello moved in the opposite direction at a more moderate pace, taking the emergency exit down to the ground level and leaving the precinct through a backdoor. Cold air turned their breath into white plumes as they walked through freshly fallen snow and finally got to the black van parked at the curb in front of a small restaurant. 

 

Schuldig was too tired and too fixated on what lay before them to bother with muddling the thoughts of the few people they passed on their way there; he climbed into the passenger seat next to Farfarello, directing a glance at the two in the back as Farfarello pulled away from the curb. 

 

“Just like old times,” Farfarello said, sounding entirely too happy even for Schuldig’s taste. 

 

“Except that it was usually Crawford who did the driving,” Nagi pointed out. “Where are we going now? We have almost two hours left.”

 

Without taking his eye off the street before him, Farfarello reached back and grabbed the backpack sitting on the floor between Nagi’s feet. He dumped it in Schuldig’s lap. “The stone. Get it out.”

 

Carefully, Schuldig took the Lazarus Stone out of the backpack. It was wrapped in a shirt, but he could feel it vibrate even through the cloth. Turning it over in his hands, he shrugged and looked at Farfarello. “Now what?” 

 

“Now we’re going to get something to eat. Unwrap it.” 

 

He didn’t like that tone of voice but did as Farfarello told him, discarding the shirt to the ground. 

 

Farfarello reached over just as they reached a red light, fingers splayed as he placed his palm against the Lazarus Stone. The unearthly glow flowing through the cracks in the stone like blood through veins earned a sharp gasp from Schuldig. He nearly dropped the stone out of surprise. “Hey!”

 

“Hold it. Don’t let go.” 

 

“Whatever you’re doing,” Crawford said in a tight voice, “I hope it doesn’t blow us all to hell.”

 

“Far from it.” Fingers bending on the Lazarus Stone, gaze fixed firmly on the street in front of them, Farfarello grinned. “There.”

 

A group of teenagers, dressed up in flimsy Goth clothing, crossed the street in front of the van. In the headlights, their make-up turned their faces into round moon faces punctuated with black eyes and lips. 

 

“The light’s turned green,” Nagi pointed out. “Are you going to run them over?”

 

Schuldig felt the power when it came. He was sure the others felt it, too. Like a warm wave leaving butterflies in its wake, and so good that he forgot for a moment that Farfarello was indeed using the Lazarus Stone to focus and direct his Gift. He heard gasps from the back and felt one of Nagi’s knees jerk into the back of his seat, heard the metallic ‘chink’ of a gun being primed and saw Crawford raise said gun to the back of Farfarello’s head. 

 

A glance down erased all that from his awareness. The glowing veins in the stone had extended their reach into his hands, creeping up his arms beneath his skin. He dropped the Lazarus Stone with a shout of surprise. It landed on his thigh, Farfarello’s hand pressed on top of it. The Irishman’s face was knit in concentration. The veins and arteries in Schuldig’s hands and arms were still lit from within, the light forceful enough to cast eerie blue shadows across the interior of the van and their faces, but now that he had let go of the stone it faded. 

 

“Oh man,” Nagi said from behind him. “Farfarello, you sick fucker!” 

 

He pried his eyes away from his hands at last. The teenagers had stopped in the middle of the street, frozen as though someone had stopped time itself. Schuldig only needed to see their wide open, sightless eyes to know what Farfarello had done to them. One after the other they fell over into the muddy snow, their limbs bent at odd angles. 

 

Farfarello floored the gas pedal, dragging the Lazarus Stone into his lap as the van’s tires bumped over something solid. Schuldig didn’t pay attention to where they were going, eyes glued once more to his hands. The light was fading from them. A look back into the van showed that Crawford was meanwhile holding the gun between his knees and staring at his hands as well. Schuldig thought he saw a dimmer, darker glow fade from the Oracle’s fingertips. Nagi had pressed himself into a corner, eyes wide and terrified. 

 

The Irishman drove at breakneck speed until they reached a darker, seedier part of the city. He stopped the van beneath a snow-laden tree and turned off the ignition. Reaching for the backpack he shoved the Lazarus Stone into it. 

 

“That is the power Eszet wants to harness,” he said matter-of-factly, gaze fixed at the steering wheel. “Imagine that power in the hands of a resurrected Freak.”

 

Schuldig didn’t know what to think about just having been fed one or more souls. He felt oddly refreshed but wanted to puke at the same time. Thankfully, his hands had stopped glowing by now. He wrapped his arms around himself, suppressing a deep shudder, and imagined what it would be like if Farfarello were any bit hungrier for power. 

 

At the same time he imagined the power Schwarz could have possessed if they had known about all this five years ago...

 

...and discarded the thought as quickly as he could. 

 

“Don’t ever do that to me again,” Schuldig said quietly. Another shudder came and went. He turned around, but Nagi and Crawford were both staring at Farfarello, their eyes cold. At least Crawford had tucked the gun back into his shoulder holster. Catching no imminent death threats toward Farfarello from their surface thoughts, he turned back around and sighed. “So if the Elders managed to catch you and resurrected the Freak into you, we could kiss the world good bye. Thank you for driving _that_ point home _again_.” 

 

Farfarello shrugged. “We can use the energy. I didn’t know it would bother you that much. Do you mourn the cow when you eat the burger?”

 

“This isn’t quite the same, is it?” Nagi asked testily. 

 

“This is _exactly_ the same.” Farfarello let go of the steering wheel and turned in his seat. “This is what it’s like to _them_. Food, nothing more.”

 

“I’m still hungry, though,” Crawford announced suddenly.

 

*********

**January 26 th, 2002, Tokyo**

**2215 Hours**

*********

 

They found a place that sold fast food and sent Nagi inside. The atmosphere in the van was tense and charged. Schuldig spent ten minutes listening into his own mind, trying to find remnants of the souls Farfarello had ‘fed’ them. Not hearing anything, not even an echo, put most of his worries to rest but didn’t do much to elevate the feeling of unease. He caught himself looking at his hands every few minutes. 

 

There was much he wanted to ask, his inborn curiosity posing questions he wasn’t sure he wanted answers to, though. People aged and died due to a malfunction in the cells, a natural trigger in the genetic make-up that one day ceased to work and turned you down the path to slow decay and finally, death. 

 

Would it be possible to harness the Lazarus Stone’s powers to stop that process? Rewire the trigger, or even reverse its function so people wouldn’t age, wouldn’t die? Farfarello said it was possible. To Schuldig, Biokinesis looked like continual cell renewal at high speed. Adding Farfarello’s ‘draining’ or whatever it was to that led to practically limitless possibilities, all of which were too terrible to contemplate even for Schuldig.

 

The price of immortality? Two souls a day and a spoonful of Biokinesis... 

 

Fingers moved against his hand, waking him from his contemplations. Farfarello kept looking straight ahead but wrapped his fingers around Schuldig’s, squeezing lightly. “What’re you thinking about?”

 

Seeing Crawford look at them out of the corner of his eyes, Schuldig switched to telepathic conversation. _[[ Your powers, the Lazarus Stone...global pollution and overpopulation... ]]_

 

 _[[ My powers? ]]_ Farfarello’s grip tightened for a moment. _[[ What about them? If this is about those teenagers... ]]_

 

 _[[ It’s not. ]]_ Annoyed, Schuldig pulled his fingers away. _[[ Well, maybe a little. Damn, I need a holiday. A long, long holiday. ]]_

 

 _[[ I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to creep you out. ]]_

 

Farfarello reached for Schuldig’s hand again, looking out of the side window past the telepath. There was something oddly distant about his gaze. Nothing about his thoughts or emotions - at least on the surface - was out of the ordinary though, so Schuldig waited. He didn’t feel like digging too deeply, fearing that if he went deeper than just the darkness beyond the shields he would suddenly be faced with the agonized faces of those teenagers. 

 

At length, Farfarello went on, _[[ It’s natural to me, as is reading minds for you. I have to get my energy from somewhere, Schu. It’s not as if I could pull it out of a magic black hat. ]]_

 

_[[ Just warn me next time, okay? And warn Crawford and Nagi, too. You’ve pulled too many other rabbits out of the magic black hat lately, Far. ]]_

 

The passenger door in the back opened. Nagi thrust a large paper bag into Crawford’s lap as he sat down and pulled the door shut with a huff. “I got a lot of funny looks in there,” he said. “The girl at the register asked me if I’d been in a mud fight.”

 

Schuldig turned to the young man, grinning. “What did you tell her?”

 

“I told her it’s blood. I don’t think she believed me.”

 

“Figures.” Paper rustled as Crawford pulled the food out of the bag and handed them out. “No one believes in the truth.”

 

“The truth is out there...”

 

“Very funny, Schu. At least Mulder could blame this all on outer space creatures and a corrupt government instead of people like you and me.” Chopsticks followed the containers. Crawford shot the telepath a sour look. “If any of them knew that we’re trying to save their sorry asses tonight...”

 

“...they’d wish us luck and go back to their boring, mundane lives.” Farfarello declined the offered food container and started the van. “No thanks. I just ate.”

 

“You sick fuck!” Nagi and Crawford shouted at the same time.

 

Schuldig dug into his noodles. “Where are you driving?”

 

“Dogenzaka. We still got enough time and I want to see what havoc Nagi wrought.”

 

A wave of annoyance hit Schuldig’s telepathic ‘back of the head’, telling him what exactly Nagi thought of the idea. Schuldig himself was curious. Grand scale destruction had never been required of Schwarz’s telekinetic. It would be interesting to see what kind of power Nagi had a hold over now.

 

And perhaps his increasing nervousness would go away over a little sightseeing tour.

 

They approached Dogenzaka from the west end but didn’t get far into the district. Every cop of Tokyo seemed to have been ordered to the site; fire fighter trucks lined the streets, squad cars blocked alleys. Cops on foot and on rollers patrolled the streets leading into Dogenzaka. Schuldig wasn’t surprised. 

 

Farfarello parked the van in a shop driveway, checking his watch. “Quarter to eleven.” He pointed up, at the roof of one of the buildings on the other side of the street. “Anyone want to join me for a look?”

 

Crawford and Nagi declined, but Schuldig nodded eagerly and joined the Irishman. They crossed the street and went around to the back of the building, quickly and quietly climbing a fire ladder. The roof Farfarello had chosen was flat and lined with antennas, which gave them a modicum of cover from prying eyes should an overly eager cop decide to take a look. 

 

A little out of breath - he really had been smoking too much lately, but damned if he didn’t crave a cigarette right now - Schuldig sought out a spot close to the edge of the roof and crouched down. Dogenzaka had been turned into a sea of light. Even from the distance he saw groups of white-clothed people move to and fro between the ruins of what once had been apartment buildings. A fine cloud of dust still lay over Dogenzaka’s west end, hours after Nagi had wreaked his havoc. 

 

“Kid needs a holiday,” Farfarello said at Schuldig’s side. He was positively gleeful and barely managed to hide it. “I thought Manx was exaggerating but it looks as though he really destroyed half of the district.”

 

“Yeah...” The apartment complex Schwarz’s old headquarters were located in had been reduced to a heap of rubble, that much Schuldig was sure of. Wishing he’d brought a pair of binoculars he moved closer to the edge of the roof. “With that much power I wonder if those bombs are really necessary. Nagi could bring the Takatori Tower down without breaking a sweat.”

 

“I like bombs.” Farfarello’s hand crept up the inside of his leg, giving a firm squeeze to his butt before the fingers hooked into the back of his belt to pull him away from the edge of the roof. Schuldig allowed himself to be dragged back to chest with the Irishman and laid his head back as Farfarello’s lips trailed over the side of his throat. “Fire and brimstone in a neat package.”

 

“No bombs, no possible threat to have anything traced.” Reaching up to cup the side of Farfarello’s face, Schuldig pulled him down for a short kiss. “You wouldn’t even have to go _into_ the tower...”

 

“Oh, but that would rob me of the chance to get my revenge,” Farfarello said through a razor-sharp smile. “I’ve been waiting to meet Claudia for a long time now, believe me.”

 

“What’s it with you and that bitch, anyway?”

 

“She’s my old teacher, Miss -”

 

“- Gooding, you said that before.”

 

“She was the one who discovered me in Ireland. You might say she was the one who started it all...in a way.” 

 

Unbidden Schuldig’s mind supplied him with a row of perfectly aligned images from Farfarello’s memory; childhood memories that all had a sense of oddness, of wrongness about them. Farfarello as a child had had something undeniably strange and cold about him. All that soft skin, chubby cheeks and miniature limbs paired with inquisitive amber eyes and the potential to become a god made for a disturbing mixture. Now that Schuldig knew what Farfarello’s foster family had looked like, it was hard for him to believe that no one had ever questioned his real heritage before Eszet decided to track down - 

 

There was a disturbance in Farfarello’s memories, an event so muddled with emotions that even Schuldig, who had the advantage of being the casual observer, had problems keeping the what and when apart. That disturbance had the nasty habit of influencing the rest of his memories, giving most of them a deeply red tinge.

 

A kitchen floor awash in blood, tranquil silence shattered by a small girl’s screams and beyond that the bone-deep fear that _they_ would come and get him... 

 

It was impossible for Schuldig to determine if Eszet, according to Farfarello’s memories, had tracked down the child or the mother. It had never mattered to the Irishman, and it didn’t really matter to Schuldig either, but if the Lazarus Stone and the Biokinetics really had that much of a history as Farfarello insisted it would be interesting to know if Farfarello’s father had been in a similar situation as the son was now. Farfarello believed his father had died or killed himself in a fire...

 

Inevitably he thought of Farfarello’s plan to use the bombs. 

 

“History has the habit of repeating itself, you know?” Schuldig said softly, staring at the lights hovering in the dusty sky above Dogenzaka. He easily picked up Farfarello’s confusion and sighed. “Sorry. Just thinking.”

 

“Ah.” Farfarello’s arms tightened before they released the telepath. “We should get back to the van.”

 

The hands on his watch approached the eleventh hour. Schuldig rose and followed the Irishman back to the fire ladder. As they climbed down, he reached for Crawford’s mind. _[[ Have any visions of the world ending in fire lately? ]]_

 

 _[[ Not that I remember any. Why...?_ ]] Crawford sounded suspicious. 

 

They reached the end of the ladder. _[[ Just curious. ]]_ Out of habit, Schuldig reached into a pocket for his pack of cigarettes, only to remember that he’d smoked his last at the precinct. Sighing with annoyance, the telepath looked around. “There’s a bar. Let me get some cigarettes.”

 

When he returned to the van, Farfarello plugged the cigarette from his lips and took a deep drag. He let the smoke out and handed the small white stick back, drawing a face at the taste. “I’ll never understand what people see in this.”

 

“I’m exercising my right to choose my own death,” Schuldig said gruffly. He looked into the back of the van as the metallic ‘shnick’ of a gun sled interrupted him. Crawford sat curled into a corner, knee propped up against the back of Farfarello’s seat, and reassembled his gun. “What’s with you?”

 

“I’m exercising my right to clean someone else’s death,” Crawford replied calmly, a grin in the corner of his mouth. He tapped the barrel of the gun against his watch. “Time to go?”

 

Schuldig looked at the van’s small digital clock and was jostled in the seat as Farfarello pulled out of the driveway, tires screeching. Apparently, the answer was yes.

 

*********

**January 26 th, 2002, Tokyo**

**2315 Hours**

*********

 

Devoid of sightseeing tourists and locals alike, the plaza in front of the Takatori Tower was ghostly silent, as was the rest of Uenokõen. Schuldig noted the absence of people on the streets as soon as they came within reach of the imposing glass and steel structure of the tower, just as he noted something else. Power, thick and suffocating like a shroud. The presence of many Gifted gathered at a specific place made for an atmosphere even the densest person could pick up on.

 

He felt anxiety from Crawford and Nagi, paired with nervousness. Farfarello emitted a calmness that was frustrating and made him wonder if the Irishman had already made peace with what was possibly to come. The thought was disconcerting. If you went into a fight with nothing left to lose there wasn’t much you could fight for. In Schuldig’s experience, those with nothing left to lose were most often the ones left behind because there was nothing to come back to once they had achieved their goal. 

 

He had to trust Farfarello on that one. Otherwise, Schuldig knew, he’d hit him over the head first chance he had and drag him out of the tower, thus ruining the Irishman’s carefully constructed plan.

 

The Cadwallader and Manx were waiting for them at the back of a shop two blocks away from the tower. The men wore dark jackets over their bullet-proof vests and held semi-automatic and automatic guns in their weathered hands. The chief of police stood at the far corner of the shop, her back turned to the group, speaking rapidly into a cell phone. Undoubtedly, Dogenzaka’s destruction left her with a lot of work to do. Schuldig imagined her absence would raise questions, especially among her superiors; then again, why bother with worrying about answering a few questions? If Manx survived the night she would reach a goal which, Schuldig suspected, had sustained her for years. 

 

First, though, she had to survive the night.

 

Farfarello set the duffel bag he’d brought from the van down on the ground and opened it to take out a crowbar. He hooked the crooked end into the steel plate covering a sewer opening and dragged the lid to the side, revealing the inky blackness of Tokyo’s underground world. The stench that rose from the hole in the ground made the recent meal in Schuldig’s stomach churn. 

 

_[[ This will make two times I’ve waded through shit and piss for you. I hope you appreciate the gesture. ]]_

 

Farfarello gave him a small grin. _[[ You don’t want to know how often I’ve been down there in the last five years, then. ]]_ Aloud, he said, “The Cadwallader, Schuldig and I will take this route. Manx, Crawford and Nagi will approach the tower from the front. We have half an hour. It’s...” He checked his watch. “...twenty minutes before midnight now.”

 

Affirmative nods and sounds from the Cadwallader were interrupted as Manx returned from her phone call. “Bad news,” she said, “Due to the incident at Dogenzaka the city government has decided to call for a state of emergency. They’re broadcasting it on the TV and the radio stations now. There’ll be heavy surveillance on the streets, especially around high profile buildings.”

 

“Damn it.” Crawford waved a hand at the general direction of the tower. “That complicates things. That -” 

 

Schuldig saw the spark in the Oracle’s eyes and waited patiently. 

 

“That gives me an idea,” Crawford said with a small grin. “Excuse me for a moment.” He pulled Manx to the side.

 

Farfarello said, “Whatever he comes up with, we’ll go through with our plan. We need ten minutes to reach the basement of the tower from here. Another five minutes with the freight elevator to go up. After we’ve dealt with the Elders, we can take the normal elevator back down.” Taking a deep breath, the Irishman looked at the men. “If all goes according to plan we’ll be out of the tower and out of harm’s reach by the time the bombs do their work.”

 

“How are they triggered?” Nagi asked. “Remote?”

 

“Time fuse,” one of the Cadwallader said. “Once we have set the timer, there is no going back.”

 

“Peachy.”

 

Farfarello chuckled at the telekinetic. “You’re not the one going into the tower, Nagi.”

 

“That doesn’t make me like this any more. I’m the one who gets the tower falling on him when it goes down.” 

 

Crawford and Manx rejoined the group. Schuldig noted the smile on Crawford’s face had turned downright evil, while Manx’s expression bordered on exasperation. 

 

“I have an idea how to keep the cops off our backs _and_ occupy the Gifted inside the tower,” Crawford said, smirking. He held up his cell phone. “Terrorists have invaded the Takatori stronghold. The same terrorists that have levelled Dogenzaka.”

 

“But that will lead them right to us!” one of the Kritiker agents exclaimed.

 

“Exactly. It’ll give those Gifted in the tower something to do,” Crawford said. He turned to Farfarello. “That also means Nagi and I can go with you and Schu.”

 

Manx willing to sacrifice her own people? Good cops who had nothing to do with Eszet, with Schwarz, with what once had been Kritiker? Schuldig raised an eyebrow at her and received a light shrug in return. 

 

 _[[ Whatever it takes..._ _]]_ Manx said. Her eyes were hard and glittering. 

 

_[[ You’ll do? Damn, you’re becoming more and more like us. ]]_

 

_[[ Don’t insult me. ]]_

 

He turned from her to find Crawford and Farfarello engaged in a staring match. Prepared to split them up, Schuldig was surprised that there was no need. Farfarello checked his watch and simply said, “Okay.”

 

“Listen.” One of the Cadwallader raised a hand. In the silence that followed his gesture, the wail of approaching sirens was still distant but it came closer steadily. “They’re already on their way.”

 

“Then we should also be on our way.” Farfarello took the Lazarus Stone out of his duffel bag before he dropped it down the sewer. Before they had left the van, he had strapped a leather pouch to his belt. Shoving the stone into that pouch, Farfarello then followed his duffel bag.

 

Schuldig heard the dull sound of boots hitting stone and dirt below and judged the distance as fifteen, maybe twenty feet, but not having the advantage of knowing what it looked like down there he chose the rusty, dirty iron ladder. Once he had somewhat even ground back under his feet he needed a moment to keep his stomach under control as the stench hit from all sides. What little light still fell through the opening of the sewer showed him crusted brick walls slick with moisture and dark mud that covered the ground. 

 

Someone pulled the lid back over the opening, casting them into total darkness. 

 

“Pay attention where you put your feet,” Farfarello’s disembodied voice advised to the sound of a zipper being tugged open. “Some parts of the tunnel system are old and decaying.”

 

Light flooded the narrow tunnel they stood in as flashlights were switched on. Schuldig accepted one from Farfarello and stayed at his side as they walked down the tunnel. Ever so often a light beam would catch a rat, causing the rodent to either freeze or flee in terror; there were moans and whispers of disgust all around as they passed the carcass of a cat or small dog which was literally infested with the grey-furred bodies of rats. Schuldig held a hand before his mouth and pressed on after Farfarello. 

 

It took them the better part of ten minutes to reach what Schuldig recognized as the foundation beams beneath the Takatori Tower’s underground garages. Schwarz had known about the secret tunnels dug into the tower’s structure but there had never been a need to go beneath its very foundation. He remembered using the tunnels a handful of times, mostly for snooping purposes. 

 

Farfarello stopped at the mouth of a narrow passage and turned. “This leads right to the support structures.” He checked his watch, the tiny glow of the LED display giving an unnatural colour to his eye as he held it close to his face. “Set the timers to half an hour and then get the hell out of here.”

 

Schuldig looked after the Cadwallader until they’d disappeared in the darkness. “Half an hour. We’re on a tight schedule.”

 

“Then we shouldn’t linger.” Farfarello set the duffel bag down on the ground and threw his flashlight on top of it. “I go first.”

 

They followed down the narrow passage until Farfarello stopped and ran his hands along the wall on the right. Schuldig heard him murmur under his breath as though he was using magic to find the hidden door there. “Sesame, open?”

 

With a creak and rattle straight out of a cheap horror flick, the door opened. Pale, unsteady green light flooded part of the passage, allowing them sight of a very narrow staircase leading upward. Schuldig knew that sight - all tunnels through the tower were narrow, leaving enough space that one man could fit through them just so. Farfarello nodded silently as he stepped through the door. “We need to go up to the second floor.”

 

“I thought we were going to use the freight elevator?” Nagi asked quietly. “Change of plan?”

 

“No. There is a door to the kitchen and cafeteria area on the second floor. We’ll take the elevator from there. Otherwise we’d have to go across the entire reception area, which should be crawling with Eszet folk now.” 

 

Schuldig stepped into the green-lit tunnel, at once feeling enclosed in a space too narrow. If one of them fell during a run, the others behind him wouldn’t have much of a chance but to fall over him since there was no space to manoeuvre. He’d always had trouble imagining the old man Takatori to make use of these tunnels himself without getting stuck; truthfully, Takatori’s henchmen - Schwarz, for example - had used them far more often. 

 

Yet no one had used them as often as Farfarello. He quickly led the small group up the staircase, past small, sealed doors leading into yet other tunnels. At one point in time, Schuldig thought he heard gunfire, but the sound was distant and their footsteps’ echo was loud. “Think they’re having their own private war out there by now?”

 

“I sure hope so,” Crawford said from the rear. “Otherwise we’d be having all the fun.” 

 

“Quiet now.” Farfarello stopped suddenly and touched a part of the wall, sliding a piece of metal to the side to reveal a tiny window covered with a mesh screen. He looked through it and slid the metal covering back into its place. “Clear.” 

 

Next to the tiny window Schuldig saw the outlines of a door in the wall. It had no handle - few of the doors in the tunnels did - but it gave with a metallic click as the Irishman pressed against it. Schuldig narrowed his eyes against the harsh neon light flooding the narrow tunnel and morosely stared at the kitchen appliances sitting polished and ready for use on their stainless steel tables. Not even the coffeemakers were in use. He turned to watch Farfarello push the door shut again. Its front was disguised with a tall refrigerator. _[[ I guess Claudia likes takeout, hm? ]]_

 

 _[[ We’ll find out soon enough. ]]_ Farfarello pointed at a door on the other side of the kitchen. _[[ There’s the elevator. Let’s go. ]]_

 

They were halfway across the room when Schuldig felt gentle fingers slide over his shields, probing here and there. He stopped dead, blinking. “Shit. Telepathic scan.” He’d been expecting it, knowing that with so many Gifted in the tower, there would be other Telepaths. “Let me give them a friendly welcome and a kick good bye.”

 

Farfarello wrapped a hand around his wrist. “We don’t have time.”

 

“This won’t take long.” 

 

But he let himself be pulled the rest of the way to the elevator as he concentrated, sorting through the various ‘signatures’ he perceived. Schuldig was much more powerful a Telepath than he’d ever let Eszet know, an advantage he used now as he gathered as much strength as he dared to use and sent it back through the probes. Two of them snapped immediately, fading away into the chaos that broke loose among the others. He wasn’t aware of the cold grin on his lips as Farfarello pulled him into the freight elevator and pushed him against a wall.

 

“Don’t overtax yourself,” Farfarello warned in a rough whisper. 

 

Schuldig had to smile at the concern in the Irishman’s voice and gaze. “I haven’t even started yet.”

 

The doors to the kitchen flew open just as the doors of the elevator began to close. Crawford fired two shots, killing the first two men who stormed into the kitchen. “They know we’re here.”

 

“No shit, Sherlock. Get out of my way.” Nagi took a breath and made a motion with his hand. Kitchen appliances, tables, silverware - the entire kitchen seemed to move at once, cupboards and racks shaking on the walls. Schuldig caught a glimpse of a young woman getting impaled by a chair’s legs before the doors closed entirely and they were on their way up. 

 

The floor numbers ticked by more slowly than they would have on a normal elevator; several times, the carriage was shaken as though explosions were rocking the building. Schuldig wished he could see what was going on outside but had to make do with the knowledge that he could take as long a look as he wanted when everything else was over. He leaned into Farfarello’s side, watching the control panel tell them which floor they were on. “What makes you so sure they’re on the last floor?”

 

“I just know it.”

 

Crawford muttered something under his breath. 

 

“I can feel Claudia,” Farfarello went on. “I know she’s there.” 

 

The hesitant tone in his voice made Schuldig look at him. He noticed Farfarello’s hand was in the leather pouch containing the Lazarus Stone. “Don’t tell me you can track her through that thing. How do you know it’s not going to backfire and lets her barbeque us all?”

 

“I just know it.” 

 

“I don’t like this,” Nagi said slowly. Then he was cut off abruptly. 

 

Schuldig didn’t hear an explosion, but the entire carriage suddenly shook as though a bomb had detonated nearby. His heart failed a beat as he heard metal screech all around them, falling to his knees as a second shake followed the first. Parts of the elevator ceiling crashed down on them, one landing heavily on the back of Schuldig’s right shoulder. He gritted his teeth at the resulting stab of pain and felt the heat of blood under his shirt and jacket, scrambling back to his feet.

 

It didn’t stop. The walls of the elevator began to move, denting and moaning. Frantically, Schuldig crawled away from the wall he’d been huddling against and looked back over his shoulder, cursing loudly as the wall didn’t stop moving inward. 

 

Nagi shouted something. The walls of the elevator burst at the seams but thankfully stopped moving as a heavy blast of Telekinesis bloated the entire carriage...and held it in place against the shaft walls. 

 

“What was that?” Crawford pulled Nagi up. The Telekinetic had suffered a blow to the head; blood ran down the side of his face and dripped onto his chest. He pulled away from Crawford and wiped it off. 

 

“That was a taste,” Schuldig said, pointing upward. The entire elevator ceiling had been opened upward as though someone had applied a giant can opener. The edges of the metal looked torn, but they weren’t ragged. He couldn’t see much of the walls of the elevator shaft above them, but the support beams in their immediate surroundings seemed to have been twisted out of shape. “That was Jonathan Downs. The Singer. Metal and stone, remember?”

 

“Wonderful. Let’s hope his son doesn’t give us a taste, too.” Crawford stared up. “We’re stuck. What floor are we on?”

 

“The display’s been mangled, but we must be somewhere between the fortieth and fiftieth floor if Downs didn’t drop us a few floors with his trick.” Farfarello stepped into the middle of the carriage, reaching for the edges of the open ceiling. He pulled himself up and disappeared out of view, only his disembodied voice still echoing down to them. “There should be another - ah. There.” 

 

“I can’t hold us for much longer,” Nagi announced through gritted teeth. 

 

The telekinetic had clearly overtaxed himself at Dogenzaka and was paying the price for his trick in the kitchen now. Schuldig stared upward, trying to catch a glimpse of where Farfarello had gone, but all he saw was darkness and bent metal. _[[ Farfarello? ]]_

 

_[[ Tell Nagi to forget the fucking carriage and float you up. There’s a door about ten feet above you. ]]_

 

Stuck in an elevator shaft with nothing but Nagi’s Gift between them and a plunge to certain death.

 

Schuldig exhaled noisily but relayed the message, catching Crawford’s narrow-eyed glare upward. He didn’t have time for much else. Grabbed and lifted by invisible hands, Schuldig was quickly lifted off the ground and floated through the destroyed elevator ceiling into the darkness of the shaft. He still couldn’t see where Farfarello had gone and fought the urge to clamp himself onto the nearest metal beam as light fell down from above and he saw Farfarello’s silhouette. The Irishman grunted with strain as he pushed the door above them open and vanished from sight once more. 

 

“Farfarello? Far!” Screams and shouts from above. “Damn it! Nagi, hurry!”

 

“We’re coming.” Nagi and Crawford floated toward him like ghosts. The Telekinetic looked pale and drawn but directed them safely toward the open door. As soon as they had steady ground back under their feet, Schuldig ran into the corridor and nearly slipped on a puddle of blood. There were several corpses but Farfarello was nowhere to be seen.

 

The loud crash coming from behind jerked Schuldig around. Dust clouds trailed out of the open elevator shaft. Nagi stood at the edge and looked down, a hard smile on his face. “That one won’t be coming back up for sure.”

 

“Where’s Farfarello?” Crawford looked at the corpses. Most of them had cut throats, the rest lay wide-eyed, their necks bent at odd angles. “Don’t tell me he ran off again.”

 

 _[[ Far? Where are you? ]]_ Schuldig hoped this wasn’t the case but there was no sight of the Irishman and the sounds of fighting came from far away. He checked his watch. “We have less than twenty minutes left.”

 

Down the corpse-ridden corridor, a door flew open, spilling Farfarello and a young woman onto the floor. She had a large gash across her throat but her hands were locked around Farfarello’s neck, strangling him for all she was worth until the Irishman delivered a brutal blow to the side of her head and shoved her off. Stumbling and falling over one of the corpses, she didn’t have the time to utter a last scream as Farfarello’s boot heel crushed her larynx. 

 

Farfarello looked over at them, jerking his head in the direction of the stairs at the end of the corridor. “This way.”

 

They ran down the corridor and burst through the door leading into the stairwell just as a small group of Gifted burst into the corridor. The ensuing struggle was brief and violent and ended with Crawford emptying half his clip into a very persistent Pyrokinetic while Schuldig, Nagi and Crawford ran ahead up the stairs. Schuldig’s lungs started to protest after they’d made it six floors but he pressed on, feeling the minutes tick by. Now that they were so close to their goal, he wondered how Farfarello intended to go about finishing off the other Biokinetic _and_ make it back out of the tower in the time they had left. 

 

And they hadn’t yet deal with Jonathan and Mark Downs, either. The Singer’s ‘gift’ to them had left Schuldig with the same kind of respect he had toward Nagi’s Telekinesis. Anything that could break bones and bring down buildings without laying a hand on either deserved a healthy portion of respect.

 

Farfarello didn’t utter a single word as he ran. His mind was strangely empty, almost closed off to the happenings around him from what Schuldig could see the few times he dared to take his concentration off their surroundings. 

 

Twice, loyal Eszet agents intercepted them on the stairs; twice, Schuldig and Nagi took care of them while Crawford took care of the rear. Farfarello didn’t even seem to perceive them anymore. 

 

“He runs as though he’s possessed,” Nagi panted as they reached the landing of the fiftieth floor and Farfarello halted in front of the metal door. 

 

“He is,” Schuldig said, equally out of breath. He leaned against the railing and closed his eyes, thirst burning at his throat, pain clenching his sides. Casting his awareness into the corridor beyond the door he came up against deceptive silence, thick, syrupy and all too familiar. “They’re shielded. Heavily. Leave the Telepaths to me.”

 

“What exactly is going to happen now?” Crawford arrived last, gun pointed down the stairwell. 

 

“I don’t know what _you_ are going to do, but I’m going in there now.” Farfarello held the Lazarus Stone in both hands before his chest like a shield. When Schuldig walked over to him he saw that Farfarello’s eye was closed and his lips moving, but he couldn’t understand a word. It sounded like gibberish, but...there was a rhyme to it. 

 

Schuldig didn’t dare to interrupt Farfarello, even more so since whatever happened now relied on what Farfarello went on to do. 

 

He became aware of a rise in intensity of the shields beyond the door. Checking his watch revealed that they now had only fifteen minutes left. Catching worried glances from Nagi and Crawford, Schuldig knew they were aware of the press of time, too. 

 

Finally, Farfarello stopped murmuring and straightened up, squaring his shoulders. “Stay behind me.”

 

The metal door opened for them. Schuldig immediately tensed, looking the muscled hulk who had opened it up and down. The man gave him a cursory glance, then looked at Farfarello and stepped to the side to let them into the corridor. As they passed him, Schuldig gave him a hard stare. _[[ Try anything stupid and you’ll be dead before you hit the ground. ]]_

 

 _[[ You don’t interest us, traitor. ]]_ The man didn’t look at Schuldig as he replied, eyes glued on Farfarello and the Lazarus Stone in the Irishman’s hands. _[[ In a few minutes you’ll be crawling at my feet. ]]_

 

In a few minutes, Schuldig thought grimly, this entire tower is going to hell. He kept the thought to himself, glancing down the corridor. Apart from Conan the Barbarian at the door, they seemed to be alone. 

 

Crawford drew abreast with him. He didn’t speak but Schuldig could feel the tenseness roll off him in waves. Nagi was an ever watchful presence at his side. This wasn’t so much different from the first time they had gone against Eszet, only that back then they had held all the trump cards. 

 

This time, they only had a Joker, and none of them knew what he was going to do.

 

*********

**January 27 th, 2002, Tokyo**

**0018 Hours**

*********

 

They opened soundlessly inward, the doors to the late Mamoru Takatori's office. Schuldig suppressed the irrational urge to check for men in hooded cloaks once they stepped inside; instead, he fixed his gaze on the three figures standing with their backs turned to the doors in front of the panorama windows. Four other people stood in the office, silent and motionless like well-trained soldiers awaiting an order. Telepaths. Schuldig looked at them, but like the Conan look-alike they didn’t pay him much attention. 

 

He wasn’t sure if he should feel insulted or be happy about it. The large clock hanging on the wall to his left told him that they had preciously few minutes left. Increasingly nervous about that fact, Schuldig stepped close to Farfarello’s side and murmured, “What now, Houdini?”

 

“Now,” one of the three people at the windows said, “Now we’ll witness something this city has never seen before.”

 

The speaker turned around. Schuldig recognized Jonathan Downs from the photos Crawford’s uncle had shown them. He didn’t look much different from his photographed likeness but there were rings of fatigue under his cold grey eyes. 

 

As if on command, the other two turned as well. Mark Downs, almost a perfect, younger copy of his father, and Claudia Lamont stood on Jonathan’s sides like watchdogs.

 

“I see you brought the stone,” Jonathan Downs went on, his tone of voice conversational. “That is very good. I’d have been most displeased if you had showed up without it.”

 

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Farfarello said softly. 

 

Schuldig watched Claudia Lamont, the woman who had been on Farfarello’s mind for such a long time. An initial impression yielded little of interest - she had crow’s feet around her eyes and her mouth was a stern, bloodless line. For someone who _had_ to know that there were bombs at the foundation of the tower, she was remarkably calm. 

 

So were the Downs and the Telepaths, come to think of it. Schuldig had the beginnings of a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach as he watched the trio behind Mamoru Takatori’s desk. Either these people didn’t care that they tower would come down around them like a house of cards, or there was something...

 

He looked at the Telepaths, whose faces were as empty as a mad sculptor’s creations. It was an expression he knew too well; he’d seen it in Nagi’s, Crawford’s, Farfarello’s memories. Their bodies were here, but their minds were elsewhere, probably down on the ground floor of the tower. 

 

Schuldig knew with startling clarity that Manx and the Cadwallader hadn’t successfully planted the bombs. Not even the Eszet Elders would be stupid enough to face that kind of threat. 

 

As if to ascertain Schuldig’s suspicion, Jonathan Downs said, “We took care of that handful of Ungifted down at the foundations of the tower, of course. I must say, Farfarello, you disappoint me.” The mildly accusatory tone of voice didn’t match the icy cold of Downs’ eyes. “What did you think you’d accomplish with such a foolish act?”

 

Jonathan Downs’ face began to move. It was subtle at first - a muscle twitch here, a minute tremble of the skin stretched over bone there. Schuldig stared hard at the man, believing his eyes were playing tricks on him, but then he saw a vein at the side of Downs’ face pulse. 

 

Harder to believe was that Downs didn’t seem to be aware of the changes and carried on with his sermon, addressing Crawford. “Oracle! I’ve heard so much of you. Unfortunately I must admit that _what_ I heard of you doesn’t match what I’m seeing.”

 

Crawford didn’t rise to the bait. “You heard the wrong things, then.” 

 

From Crawford’s tone of voice Schuldig knew he wasn’t the only one seeing the changes taking place in Jonathan Downs’ face. Even Mark Downs was shooting looks at his father’s face, concern in his eyes. 

 

Claudia Lamont’s eyes were narrowed in concentration. “Oh, you won’t -”

 

“I waited twenty years for this,” Farfarello growled under his breath. “I will.”

 

Jonathan Downs began to age rapidly, still speaking on, but no one understood his words anymore as his jaw began to sag; his cheeks began to hollow, the skin stretching dry and porous over bone, tendon and flesh. Schuldig watched with horrid fascination as the hair began to drift from Downs’ head, big fluffy clouds that sank gently to the floor. 

 

To the side, one of the Telepaths tipped forward and hit the ground with a hollow thump. Jerking twice to the crackle of bones twisting, he died, leaving Schuldig with nothing but the knowledge of a mind snapping out of existence. 

 

“Get out of here,” Schuldig said, his voice barely carrying across the room. He stared at Farfarello’s back and moved away until he felt a wall at his back. “Get out of here. Run.”

 

“I can’t...move...” Crawford dropped his gun, his eyes wild as he slowly turned his head to stare at Schuldig. “I can’t...”

 

Mark Downs uttered a guttural scream and lunged, but Schuldig couldn’t tell if he wanted to reach Claudia or Farfarello. The Singer’s voice made the walls vibrate but before he could do any damage, he crashed heavily onto the desk between the two Biokinetics, curling up with a horrible gurgling sound. Different from his father, Mark Downs didn’t age before he died; like a fly caught between two electric fields he was fried and dropped, nothing more but a corpse with grotesquely bent limbs. 

 

This was it, then, the final confrontation. Instead over the body of a girl in a coma, this battle was fought with the life forces of friends and foes. Schuldig gasped as he began to feel the first waves of power reaching for him and tried to jerk away, but his legs denied obedience. He felt for the door, felt the wood under his fingers, and then...a heartbeat. 

 

A deep, wet, sucking sound that drowned all other sounds echoed deeply into his body. His fingers bent of their own will, nails cutting into the skin of his palms. Schuldig moaned softly - the pull was incredible. He closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see the veins on the backs of his hands as he felt them pulse with the heartbeat. He didn’t want to see his hair fall out and drift toward the floor. 

 

One after the other, the Telepaths standing at the wall vanished from his awareness, so quickly that they didn’t even leave a hole in the spot they had occupied. 

 

A flash of light danced across Schuldig’s retinas, burning through his eyelids in a stroboscope dance. He felt the blood run from the cuts in his palms as he sank to the floor, knees and shoulder sending strangely _distant_ messages of pain through nerve endings that seemed to come alive with the light. His skin didn’t fit him anymore. 

 

He heard glassy wings again, or thought he did. 

 

Ant’s feet against metal. 

 

Someone fell and hit the ground, uttering a curse and a plea all wrapped into one. From the sound of the voice it had been Crawford, but Schuldig couldn’t be sure anymore. His eyes were opening now but all he saw were colliding fields of light. 

 

He didn’t want to die here. He didn’t want to lie here to have his life sucked out of him by the warring forces of two Gifted who’d been given too much power by whatever fucked up deity doled them out. 

 

Schuldig pushed worry to the back of his mind, concentrating on the anger that rose readily, his best and steadiest servant through the years. Reaching out with his Telepathy, he found Crawford’s and Nagi’s minds as if feeling them through a thick gel. Neither of them responded - Nagi was unconscious and Crawford too wrapped up in fear to even notice Schuldig’s presence calling for him - but at least they were still alive. 

 

He went further, extending his reach, and brushed against something that burned him as he touched it. 

 

No.

 

Not it.

 

 _Them_. 

 

Farfarello’s and Claudia’s minds felt like white-hot fields of energy that didn’t touch but were close enough to create sparks flying between them. Schuldig knew the mind of a Gifted using his power felt different, but he’d never quite experienced something as obscenely powerful as this. He pulled away from it, knowing he wouldn’t find purchase there. 

 

The heartbeat kept thundering around him, but somehow he knew it was only inside his mind, inside his head. He felt the pull tearing at his very insides and knew it wasn’t going to kill him. 

 

Schuldig abruptly rolled onto his knees and rose, amazed that he could. 

 

“You bastard,” Claudia Lamont choked out. Her face was contorted with strain, but her eyes were burning with rage. She was leaning hard on the desk, almost bent over the corpse of her husband, and didn’t even seem to notice Schuldig as the Telepath slowly walked along the wall of the office to get a better view of what was happening. “You got away once. You’re not going to get away twice.”

 

Farfarello’s voice was soft, near dreamy as he spoke. “I’ve been getting away for years. I’ve been getting away all my life.”

 

Schuldig shook his head, but he couldn’t stop the Irishman as he slowly lifted the Lazarus Stone above his head as if offering it to an unseen God. Blue light bloomed in the centre of the stone, flowing over its surface into Farfarello’s hands and arms. The same rivers Schuldig had seen glow beneath his own skin now raced along the Irishman’s entire body, but instead of cumulating or fading, they pooled at his feet and began to creep along the floor like snakes tasting their prey. 

 

Claudia Lamont jerked away from the desk and stumbled back. She raised her hands as well, mirroring Farfarello’s moves like a parrot. Schuldig had never seen such anger on the face of a person before. She opened her mouth and screamed, pushing her hands toward Farfarello’s oddly still form.

 

The words leaving her mouth fell between them all like stones, bringing an abrupt end to the heartbeat Schuldig felt. He recognized those words, remembered them, and felt the hair at the back of his neck rise. He’d heard them before, five years ago, chanted by a thousand-voiced choir in a hall at the edge of the ocean. 

 

Farfarello’s voice mingled with Claudia’s, easily speaking in tune with her. There was no telling if he had learned the words or if he just needed someone else to say them to know what he had to say. 

 

Crawford bumped into Schuldig’s side, breathing heavily as he squinted at the scene before them. He had dragged Nagi off the floor, holding the young man like a rag doll thrown over his shoulder. “What the fuck are they doing?”

 

There was no ready answer that came to mind although Schuldig knew what was happening here. He’d known it the moment Farfarello raised the Lazarus Stone above his head. 

 

“Get Nagi out of here,” he shouted over the sound of the two mingling voices, giving Crawford a shove in the direction of the door. “Go! There’s nothing left to do.”

 

Crawford got as far as the door before he turned around and shouted back, “What about you?”

 

“I’m staying,” Schuldig turned back toward Farfarello and Claudia and repeated to himself, “I’m right where I want to be.”

 

Energy twisted and coiled around the two Biokinetics, lashing out at the furniture around them. Both their arms were raised now, Claudia’s hands gripping the Lazarus Stone right next to Farfarello’s. Nearly nose to nose, their mouths moving still but the words flowing seamlessly together, they were staring at each other. Schuldig moved along the wall until he could see Farfarello’s face and drew a deep breath; the Irishman’s expression was empty. 

 

The shadows appearing in the light were nothing solid at first but they soon contracted to form the blurry outlines of limbs. Schuldig grit his teeth, recognizing the sight. He’d seen it before, five years ago. Unlike back then, though, the still blurred form looked definitely human, not alien, not so much like a monster. There was no scaled skin, no hooked claws. This was scarily real and Schuldig wasn’t sure what to do to keep it from happening. 

 

Farfarello and Claudia came to the end of their incantation, their voices rising from words into a long, drawn-out shout falling into tune with a sound that defied existence. The _thing_ between them screeched, twisting as it hovered several inches above the floor, and reached for both Biokinetics. 

 

 _A host…it needs a host._ Schuldig watched with some fascination as it further took shape, becoming more and more human and less shadowy. He saw the first distinct marks of a face, the first slow blinking of eyelids and the as of yet wordlessly moving lips. _There are two…_

 

With a sudden clarity, Schuldig understood was Farfarello was trying to do, and if the Irishman managed to pull it off, they actually had a chance of surviving this entire drama. More, they could even end it forever.

 

_[[ Schuldig! I need help out here! ]]_

 

Wincing as Crawford’s voice boomed between his ears, Schuldig whipped around. He’d been so fixed on the scene before him that the gunfire in the hallway outside the office had escaped him completely. Running over to the door, he threw himself to the side just in time to avoid colliding with the stumbling form of a heavily bleeding man falling into the office.

 

He reached for the minds of Crawford and Nagi, learning with trepidation that Nagi was still unconscious, and concentrated. There were at least eight attackers outside. He singled out their minds and shoved what he had at them, careless over what kind of mess he made. There were more important things to worry about than finesse. 

 

Turning around, Schuldig caught the last glimpse of the shadow sinking into Claudia Lamont. 

 

The light faded abruptly as the Lazarus Stone fell from Farfarello’s hands. Both Claudia and the Irishman stumbled backward, driven apart like magnets poled the wrong way, but whereas Farfarello fell and hit the ground, Claudia straightened up, her head thrown back, and took a deep breath. Her eyes were closed and there was a smile on her lips, but Schuldig knew that it wasn’t her who smiled, that it wasn’t the woman who breathed.

 

She took another breath and for a moment, it seemed as though there was a second face hovering above hers. The shadow, the essence of the Freak, wrapped itself around and into her before it vanished completely and destroyed what was left of Claudia’s mind. 

 

One being holding the most dangerous Gifts known to mankind stood in the office on the top floor of the Takatori Tower and breathed real air for the first time in over half a century. Schuldig would have been in awe if he hadn’t been scared shitless by what all that entailed. His hand crept toward his gun, slowly, as quick glances at Farfarello showed that the Irishman appeared to be unconscious. 

 

“You can’t kill me with this,” Claudia said matter-of-factly. Her voice had a strange undercurrent to it, like stones dropping into a deep pool. She, the Freak, wasn’t even looking at the Telepath. “There is nothing I can’t do. You can’t stop me. Don’t try.”

 

“There is one thing you can’t do,” Farfarello announced from the ground. 

 

Schuldig had no time to process what happened, could only watch, frozen, as the Irishman rolled to his feet in a liquid motion and vaulted across the space separating him from the Freak. A blade flashed between them, followed by a screech as it found its home in a soft belly and steaming innards. Shapely, manicured hands bore into Farfarello’s shoulders and tore through skin and cloth, but there was no stopping the shove that bore them toward the panorama windows.

 

If Farfarello threw himself out of that window, Schuldig knew he’d jump right after him. Just for the hell of it. Just because. 

 

Glass splintered as Claudia Lamont’s body was carried through the window and disappeared in a scream Schuldig would remember for the rest of his life, just as he would remember the silence that fell afterward. Not hearing the impact of the body on the ground fifty floors below them made it worse. It left too much to his imagination. 

 

Slumped before the window amid shards of glass and bleeding heavily, Farfarello said in a choked voice, “You can’t fly, bitch.”

 

*********

**January 27 th, 2002, Tokyo**

**0050 Hours**

*********

 

It didn’t feel like the victory it was, Schuldig thought as he dragged Farfarello to his feet. By the time he’d shaken the paralysis that had fallen over him, the Irishman had simply keeled over onto his side and was on the edge of unconsciousness. Where Claudia’s hands had touched his shoulders, flesh and cloth looked like pudding, a sight Schuldig wasn’t going to forget anytime soon. 

 

With just a touch…

 

At least that was damage that could be undone. He half-dragged, half-carried Farfarello away from the broken window and gave the Lazarus Stone a vicious kick as he passed it. The stone sailed against the far wall but didn’t shatter, bouncing once before it lay still and silent and waiting for another megalomaniac to come along and play god. 

 

“We’re going to pull a Tolkien and cast this thing into the deepest active volcano we can find,” Schuldig said through clenched teeth as he let Farfarello down and crouched at his side. “We’re going to get rid of it, and if I have to shovel the deepest hole ever known to mankind myself.”

 

Farfarello laughed breathlessly, his throat working. His eye was closed and his face wet with sweat, and when Schuldig reached for his hands, they were trembling. It took him several tries before he was able to form words. “Who’s going to be Frodo?”

 

Spearing the Irishman with a glare, Schuldig didn’t fall for the attempt at humour. “Tell me one thing, Far. Tell me this was what you had planned. Tell me this wasn’t just an impromptu decision you made right here and now.”

 

“Does it matter now?” Farfarello didn’t meet Schuldig’s eyes, staring at the broken window instead.

 

“Yes, it does.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because, you fuck!” Clenching his hands, Schuldig held back from wanting to throttle him. “Because I want to know if you’d really planned to kill yourself over this. Because I want to be _certain_ that you wouldn’t have thrown yourself out of that window.”

 

Farfarello turned his head and looked at him darkly. Something behind his eye seemed to move, to shiver, but it was gone before Schuldig could look again. In a soft, even voice, Farfarello said, “God doesn’t give out certain.”

 

“You don’t believe in God. Give me something _I_ can believe.” As soon as he said it, Schuldig knew he wouldn’t get an answer. Neither from Farfarello’s mouth nor from his mind. Sitting back with a huffed breath, telling himself that there were things that had to be mastered flying blindly or not at all, he shook his head. “Forget it.”

 

Reaching up to touch Schuldig’s cheek and hair, Farfarello shrugged lightly. “There are some things worth dying for. That’s all I can offer.”

 

“Just make sure that this _was_ the thing.” He caught the other man’s hand and kissed a knuckle. 

 

Crawford stumbed into the office, interrupting them. The Oracle looked around, still carrying Nagi’s motionless body over his shoulder, and stared at the broken window for a long moment before he turned to Schuldig and Farfarello. Looking worse than ever, with stiff hair and dried blood on his face, shirt and arms, Crawford nevertheless managed to look regal, if not a little relieved. “I’m tempted to go down and see for myself if it’s dead. It _is_ dead, right?”

 

“As dead as dead can be.” With a wince, Farfarello reached up and gingerly touched his shoulder. “Until someone tries another ritual.”

 

“Only you are left.” Schuldig drew a face and had to look away as Farfarello yanked cloth from his skin, his eyes inevitably falling on the Lazarus Stone. Just seeing it lie there gave him black thoughts. “And I don’t think you’ll go ahead and try to work the Ritual.”

 

“What am I, completely stupid? Hell, no.” He sounded contemplative as he went on, “There’s no telling how many others there are. I’m pretty sure we managed to get rid of the only living _person_ knowing how the ritual works, but that doesn’t mean there are no scriptures anywhere.”

 

Crawford gently lowered Nagi to the ground next to Farfarello and crouched down at his side. He wiped a hand across his brow, sighed, and said, “I think everything Eszet had as far as data is concerned is…here.” With a shrug, he made a gesture at the office around them. “We’ll never be completely sure, but I think if we destroy the tower…”

 

Manx. The Cadwallader. Schuldig’s eyes widened. He’d completely forgotten about them over the course of the last minutes, too glad and too exhausted to think beyond the fact that he and the rest of Schwarz were still alive. 

 

Farfarello seemed to harbour similar thoughts. With a hissed breath, the Irishman pushed to his feet and held himself upright against the wall. “We have to check on the others. See if they’re still alive. And then get the hell out of here. I don’t care to get worked up with Tokyo’s anti-terrorist forces that deeply. Not in my current state.”

 

Schuldig rose with him, looking down at Nagi’s still form as he checked his guns. A gentle probe revealed deep unconsciousness; Nagi had been hit hardest by the influence of the two Biokinetics wrestling for domination over the Lazarus Stone. Schuldig didn’t know why but guessed that it was mental exhaustion and the happenings of the last few days that made Nagi a perfect target for psychic assault right now. The young man would need a long holiday once this was over.

 

They all did.

 

Making their way out of the office and down the corridor toward the elevator they’d planned on using for their getaway, with Crawford carrying Nagi over his shoulder again and Farfarello leaning heavily on Schuldig, they didn’t hear anything suspicious on their way down to the fifth floor, where Schuldig insisted they walk out of the elevator. It wouldn’t do them any good to step out and into the arms of Tokyo’s law enforcers which were by now undoubtedly swarming the ground floor of the Takatori Tower and starting toward the higher levels. 

 

On the fourth floor, moving slowly and carefully, Farfarello opened the door to a janitor’s closet and opened another, hidden door in the back, pointing down the narrow, unevenly lit corridor behind it. “Crawford, you and Nagi can take that way down to the sublevels. Can you find the way back to the sewers?”

 

Crawford carefully manoeuvred into the narrow space, frowning as he had to move slowly. There was hardly enough space for one, let alone two men. “Yeah, I think so.”

 

“Wait for us there. If Manx and the rest of my men are still alive, we’ll find them and meet you.”

 

“What if they’re not?”

 

Farfarello shrugged. “We’ll meet you there? I’m not going to stay here and sing ditties.”

 

Crawford stopped the door from closing as Farfarello pushed it shut and said, “You really are a cold bastard.”

 

“You realize that now?” Farfarello handed Crawford the leather pouch containing the Lazarus Stone.

 

They looked at each other for a long minute, with Schuldig playing witness and having no interest to get mixed up in it. Finally, Crawford shook his head and chuckled. “Guess so. Later.”

 

Farfarello closed the door and stepped out of the janitor’s closet, turning to Schuldig with a sigh. “I hope he doesn’t get lost on his way there.”

 

“What if he does?” Schuldig took one of his guns from his holsters and checked it. 

 

“We’ll never find him again. There’s miles and miles of tunnels down there.” Farfarello was going to say something else, but he leaned against the wall instead and reached for his shoulder. “Damn it. Claudia really did a job on me.”

 

Frowning but leaving Farfarello alone for the moment, Schuldig stepped further down the hallway and concentrated on sending a call to Manx down four floors below. He didn’t get an immediate answer and tried again – Manx _had_ heard him, but her ‘voice’ was distant and there seemed to be a heavy veil between them. “Something’s not right down there.”

 

“Let’s go and see.” Sweat was beading on Farfarello’s face. “I’m going to keel over sometime soon.”

 

They made their way down to the second floor, carefully. The closer they came to the ground floor, the more Schuldig noticed the absence of sound…of movement. At the head of the stairs, a slumped body greeted them. Schuldig turned the corpse over onto its back, drawing back at the disturbing sight of wide open eyes and a mouth ready to scream.

 

What made it all the more disturbing was that the skin of the face was lined and wrinkled and looked as though this was an old man, ready to succumb to death’s siren’s call. 

 

A little further down the stairs, another corpse lay curled up on its side, with a similar expression and exactly the same signs of aging. 

 

“I have an inkling of what happened here,” Schuldig said slowly. “The same shit that happened to the Downs.” 

 

“My Gift happened,” Farfarello said entirely too cheerily.

 

Schuldig called for Manx again, having little hope left, but there was the same heavy, muffling veil between them. Following Farfarello down the stairs at a faster pace, encountering more and more corpses the closer they came to the tower’s ground hall, Schuldig prepared for an ugly sight. 

 

It was indeed ugly, but not as terrible as it might have been. Most of the people seemed to have simply slumped over and died. The scene could have been called peaceful; the only dead who’d died of shots were two of the Cadwallader, lying in puddles of their own blood, and people in civilian clothing who, Schuldig knew, were Gifted. The expressions on _their_ faces were far less terrified than the others.

 

Outside, almost directly in front of the entrance doors, another mess greeted them. Schuldig and Farfarello gave a wide birth to the shattered pulp of flesh and bone on the stones. Hardly recognizable as a human being anymore after a drop from the fiftieth floor, the body of Claudia Lamont had been spread to nearly three times its size upon impact. 

 

“Dead, all right,” Farfarello muttered. 

 

Schuldig stood next to the mess for a long moment and stared at it; he was tempted to empty his gun into what had once been a woman just to be on the safe side. He knew it was silly – knew that _no one_ survived such a drop – but the sight of the drained, aged corpses had given him quite a shake. 

 

A weak thud somewhere close by alerted them both. In one of the squad cars parked in front of the tower, sitting in the passenger seat next to a brittle corpse, they found Manx. She sat very still, her hands in her lap, and stared out of the windshield; if it hadn’t been for her clothes Schuldig wouldn’t have recognized her. The skin of her face was sagging; deep lines around her eyes and her mouth turned her from the beautiful woman she had been into an old crone, someone more fit to spring from the pages of a fairytale book than to sit in the front of a squad car. Schuldig stared at her head, saw the patches of bald skull covered with strands of thin, white hair, and shuddered. 

 

She didn’t speak as Farfarello opened the door but accepted the hand he held out to her. Her bones seemed to creak and pop as she straightened up. 

 

“I can reverse this,” Farfarello said softly, staring at her gnarled, wrinkled fingers in his. “Manx. What happened to the others?”

 

“Shot. Dead.” Bloodshot, watery eyes focused on Schuldig. “I saw terrible things. And then…” A nod toward the corpse of Claudia Lamont. “That thing. I saw it hit the ground. It was…”

 

Manx covered her face with her hands, shaking. She said something else but Schuldig couldn’t make it out, the rush of blood in his own ears too loud. “We have to get out of here,” he said, looking around. “Find Crawford and Nagi and get the hell out of here.”

 

“We have to bring down the tower,” Farfarello let go of Manx and turned, staring up at the impressive construction. “Once and for all.”

 

“We can do that later. The Cadwallader are dead. Manx is…listen, we can come back later.” Impatiently, Schuldig tugged on Farfarello’s arm and reached for Manx with his free hand. “It won’t be long till people realise what happened. You’re in no shape to fight an army of cops.”

 

Farfarello turned and sent Schuldig a look that indicated that yes, he was, but he didn’t reply. Finally giving a small nod, he turned in the direction of the sewer opening they had used to access the Takatori Tower. “All right.”

 

It went slow. Manx, silent, tears in her eyes and very much not looking at her own hands but staring straight ahead, walked as fast as she could, but she was an old woman now, or for now. Schuldig caught distinctly despairing thoughts from her as he led her along; she had been young an hour ago. That she was now old and wrinkled and weak was playing havoc on her mind. 

 

He didn’t allow himself to think about it, not yet. The sights and sounds of the last hour had been burned into his mind and could wait to be examined later. He knew he would have no trouble remembering each detail. 

 

Finding the sewer opening without trouble, Schuldig was glad to see Crawford’s pale, upturned face as Farfarello moved the heavy lid off. Crawford’s eyes widened imperceptibly at the sight of Manx but he didn’t say a word, didn’t ask, just climbed up and took a deep breath once he was out of the sewer. Nagi followed, equally pale and wordless but finally awake again.

 

‘Lucky bastard,’ Schuldig thought somewhat bitterly, ‘You’ve missed the best part of it all.’ 

 

The buildings surrounding the Takatori Tower and its plaza full of corpses slowly came alive; lights were switched on, windows were opened. The first screams mixed with inquisitive shouts and demands to call for the police. Schuldig was glad to be back in the van and turned to Crawford, Nagi and Manx in the backseat. 

 

“Okay?”

 

“Just move,” Crawford said softly. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “Just get us out of here.”

 

“Where to?” Farfarello asked. “There _is_ no place.”

 

“There is. For now.” Manx named an address that Farfarello apparently knew, for he turned around and eyed her with surprise. He didn’t comment, however, and started the van just in time to nearly run over the first spectators pouring from the entrances of the buildings. 

 

Schuldig leaned against the window of the van and stared at them as Farfarello slowly drove off. The curiosity, the almost eager need to see clearly visible on their faces, sickened him. 

 

‘There is nothing to see there’, he thought after a while, when they were already on their way out of Ginza. ‘Just the long fall after the dream.’

 

\---

 

“My keys are at the precinct,” Manx announced as they made it up the stairs of an old building on the other end of the city. “I didn’t think we’d end up here. One of you has to pick the lock.”

 

Nagi picked the lock, making short work of it, and left it to Manx to walk into the apartment first. 

 

“This is the last place they’ll look for me.” Manx switched on the light in the corridor, and Schuldig knew why. There was dust on the floor and the furniture and the place looked as though it hadn’t been used in months. “It belonged to Birman. She left me the keys before she moved to Osaka. I never thought I’d use it to hide from my own people one day.”

 

The name Birman rang a faint bell with Schuldig but he didn’t care to ask. Following Manx into a moderately large room, he helped pulling the bedspreads off the furniture and then collapsed onto a couch. Crawford and Nagi followed suit; only Farfarello, keeping close to Manx, remained standing. They had a brief conversation and left the room. Looking after them, Schuldig decided he was too tired to follow. 

 

The minutes ticked by. 

 

Eventually, Nagi said, “Well.”

 

Crawford chuckled, sitting between Schuldig and the Telekinetic. “We made it.”

 

“Did you ever doubt it?” Schuldig asked, knowing the answer he’d get. 

 

“Yes.” Movement, Crawford shifting on the couch. “I did. You know…when I found you in Venice, this wasn’t at all what I had in mind.”

 

“If I’d known this would happen, I wouldn’t have come.” 

 

“Me neither,” Nagi said. “Next time you want to ask me to join you in a personal vendetta, Crawford, assume I’ll say no.”

 

He tuned in; he couldn’t help it. Schuldig wanted to sigh at the emptiness he saw in Crawford. The Oracle had set out to avenge the death of his wife and daughter and had ended up doing something else altogether. They all had ended up doing something else. Things had not been resolved and probably never would be. Some things had become more complicated. 

 

Schuldig’s life was right up there with those. 

 

“What are you going to do when we’re done here?” Crawford asked. 

 

“I’m going back home.” Nagi sounded pensive. “I have a company to take care of. A life to live.” 

 

“Spain, hm?” For some reason, the thought of Nagi in Spain had amused Schuldig since he learned of it. He couldn’t imagine the quiet young man in a country as life-loving as Spain. “What’s the weather like?”

 

“Warm.”

 

They laughed, carefree and light for the first time in days, and when it died down the silence that fell didn’t seem as heavy anymore. After a while, Crawford stretched and reclined against the couch, sighing. “You, Schu?”

 

“Don’t know.” He glanced in the direction Farfarello and Manx had vanished. “I’ll stay with him. Or he’ll stay with me. We’ll figure something out. What about you?”

 

“Back to New York. It’s not like I have anywhere else to go.”

 

“You can come visit me in Spain,” Nagi said cheerfully, “and experience the warm weather.”

 

“I just might.”

 

Manx walked back into the room, looking disturbed. So was Schuldig after he had taken a look at her face, finding it smooth and young once more. So that was what they’d been up to. He looked behind her and half rose from the couch when Farfarello didn’t appear in her wake. 

 

“He’s in the bedroom,” Manx said, interpreting his glance right. “Asleep.”

 

“Leave it to him to fall asleep after _that_ ,” Nagi muttered under his breath. “Although I’m about to drift off myself…”

 

“You can sleep,” Manx said. She touched her face, looked at her hands and shook her head as though she couldn’t believe to be back to her normal state. “This place is safe for now. We’ll figure out the rest when we’re less tired.”

 

Schuldig found the bedroom and slipped inside, gently closing the door. Farfarello hadn’t bothered to take the sheet off the bed, had simply collapsed in the middle of it, his face hidden in the crook of an arm. He didn’t wake as Schuldig crawled in next to him, nor when Schuldig unlaced his boots and kicked his own shoes off.

 

Stretching out next to the sleeping Irishman, Schuldig felt the chill of the unheated room against his skin even under his clothes. He scooted closer to Farfarello, seeking the body warmth radiating from the other; Farfarello’s face was covered with a light sheen of sweat and was deadly pale, but the Telepath knew the signs. Had seen them before so often but only in the recent days begun to understand what they meant. 

 

Sometimes, the story only makes sense once it has come to an end. 

 

\---

 

‘Morning’ brought rain and fatigue, and the dangerous stretch of time where your thoughts start wandering off to places you don’t want them to go. There were no radio and no TV in the apartment, and the newspapers Nagi went out to buy didn’t yield enough information to satisfy Schuldig’s curiosity. 

 

“They’re very hush-hush about it all,” he said to Crawford over take-out and Styrofoam cups of coffee. “There’s hardly any mention. Unexplained circumstances, mysterious happenings, that kind of crap.”

 

“Probably because they have no fucking clue what happened.” The Oracle, still in his dirty clothing and scrubbing at blood flaking off his neck, shrugged. “Do you still want to go back for the tower?”

 

Sometime during the remainder of the night, Farfarello had woken from his sleep, turned over, and muttered something under his breath. Schuldig, bone-deep tired yet unable to find rest until a few hours ago, had made it out as ‘Lazarus’ and spent long minutes afterward staring at the leather pouch lying on a chair in a corner of the room. 

 

“Schuldig?”

 

“Sorry. I was thinking.” He took a sip of coffee and wished for a shower. There was water, even hot water, but he’d have to put his dirty clothes back on afterward and that made him feel even more uncomfortable than staying dirty. “I think Farfarello will.”

 

Manx had persuaded herself that she would not be linked to what had happened at the Takatori Tower – after all, everyone who had seen her there was dead - and had gone back to the precinct, taking Nagi with her. The Telekinetic would pick up Crawford’s rental BMW and their suitcases contained in the trunk of the car; Farfarello, Manx told Schuldig before she left, had places all over the city where he stored things he might need one day. 

 

To go back to the Seventh Serpent now would be folly. Authorities were, unfortunately, not stupid enough to not link the sudden and disproportionate violence of one place to another, especially since the events had taken place within a day of one another.

 

They were trapped in this apartment on the ass end of the city for now.

 

“I think I might just take Nagi up on his offer and visit him once we’ve wrapped things up here,” Crawford said after a while. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms behind his head, staring up at the ceiling. “There are things in New York I need to pick up on, too.”

 

‘Keep busy,’ Schuldig thought, sipping his coffee. ‘It’s all that’s now keeping you from losing it completely.’

 

They sat in silence for long minutes until Farfarello appeared in the kitchen, looking pale and drawn. Pulling out a chair, the Irishman sat down, yawned, and snagged Schuldig’s Styrofoam cup. 

 

“Good morning,” Crawford said sarcastically. 

 

Farfarello didn’t reply until he had had a swig of coffee. “Mh. What’s good about morning? What time is it, anyway?” 

 

Schuldig consulted the LED display of his cell phone. “Half past two in the afternoon.”

 

“Good time.”

 

“For what?”

 

Farfarello looked at Crawford over the rim of the cup. “To bring down the tower. What do you think? I spoke to Manx yesterday before I went to sleep. She said that they had managed to plant nearly all explosives before they were interrupted and brought up into the entrance hall. It’s a simple matter of going back there, sitting the timers, and then boom.”

 

“Farfarello…I think we should leave well enough alone.” Schuldig reached for his cup and ignored the Irishman’s frown. “I don’t think we’ll be destroying anything valuable. Most of the files they brought with them were on the ship, and that ship is history.”

 

“But…”

 

“Leave it be. Please?” Nodding in the direction of the bedroom, Schuldig set his cup down. “We have the stone. The Elders are dead. Almost _everyone_ except us is dead.”

 

The calculating look in Farfarello’s single eye didn’t escape Schuldig, but after a moment, the Irishman sighed and said, “All right.” He stared at the top of the table, drumming a rhythm on his arm. “There’s nothing left to do, then.”

 

“No,” Crawford said. “There’s one thing left to do.” 

 

Both Schuldig and Farfarello looked at him and asked in unison, “What?”

 

“We need to take a shower. We all stink.”

 

Later, behind the door to the bedroom they’d claimed, Farfarello asked, “He’s lost it completely, no?”

 

Schuldig could only nod.

 

*********

**January 30 th, 2002, Tokyo**

**1545 Hours**

*********

 

Two days crawled by at the pace of molasses. 

 

On the third, a trip to the airport was made. 

 

Nagi’s and Crawford’s planes left within an hour of each other. Neither of them wanted or needed a sentimental good bye scene, so Schuldig and Farfarello simply saw each one to their respective gate and watched until they’d disappeared. 

 

Schuldig watched Crawford and knew distinctly that this was the last time he had seen the Oracle. They had been friends through too much crap as that Schuldig would not know that. 

 

He was quiet on the ride back into the city, so much so that Farfarello finally pulled over to the curb, killed the ignition, and turned to him to ask, “All right. Spill.”

 

There were shadows of fatigue under Farfarello’s eye, even after two days of doing nothing more but sleeping and lounging. He looked thinner than usual, too. Schuldig had ridden that fact for a good two hours last night before Farfarello lost patience and nearly smothered him with a pillow before initiating the most exhausting bout of fucking Schuldig had had in quite a while. 

 

Giving a small shrug, Schuldig laid his head back. “I don’t know.”

 

“You usually do.”

 

“I’m just…fed up, tired, all that fun stuff.” He glanced at the city outside, at the flow of cars next to them. “I don’t feel comfortable here anymore.”

 

Schuldig had accompanied Manx into the precinct a day ago, manipulating quite a few minds. There was a certain time span of absence Manx hadn’t been able to explain on her own, as well as a few other things – weapons, explosives and a bullet proof vest missing from the precinct’s armoury – that needed to be explained away, and the Telepath took care of that. He returned to the apartment at the end of the city in a foul mood that came out of nowhere, and its aftershocks were still rippling through him now. 

 

“All the bad stuff that ever happened to me happened here, not counting my birth and the day Eszet found me.” A swipe of a hand described all of Tokyo around them. “If I don’t leave anytime soon, this city is going to take on monstrous proportions in my mind.”

 

Farfarello shrugged. “So we leave. It’s as easy as that.”

 

“Do you _want_ to leave? You’ve built your own kingdom here. Are you willing to give that up?”

 

“Schuldig…that kingdom is gone. The Seventh Serpent is gone.” Drumming his fingers against the steering wheel, Farfarello shrugged again, but he wasn’t quick enough to hide the sting of disappointment he felt at his own words and the truth hidden in them. Schuldig easily picked it up but chose not to comment on it. “There’s nothing here for me that I could give up still.”

 

“What about Manx?”

 

“What _about_ Manx?”

 

“She risked a lot to help us…”

 

“Schu…” Farfarello laughed softly and started the car. “I think if we stay around her for much longer, Manx is going to buy plane tickets for us herself, or shoot us, whichever comes first. Are you becoming soft?”

 

He socked Farfarello on the shoulder and laughed. “Not in this life.”

 

There were honks and shouted curses all around them as the Irishman did a U-turn in the middle of one of Tokyo’s busiest streets and headed back toward the airport they had just left. Buying tickets on the first good plane out of Japan, Schuldig felt much better when they were on their way back into the city.

 

Later, back at the apartment which was becoming too depressing for Schuldig to spend much more time in with its covered furniture and lack of signs of life, Farfarello shoved the Lazarus Stone into a carry-on and said, “Venice.”

 

“What?”

 

“Didn’t you want to go back to Europe once things were done?”

 

Schuldig, sitting on the edge of the bed, inclined his head a fraction. “Yeah…”

 

“So we go to Venice.”

 

“Any particular reason why you’re suddenly set on Venice? There’s more to Europe than that…” True, he had wanted to go back to Europe – hell, anywhere away from Japan was fine for now – but the thought of returning to the very same place Crawford had picked him up at and started this entire mess was suddenly weighting heavily on Schuldig’s spirits. “We could go to Berlin. Amsterdam. Sweden.”

 

“Yeah, but you know where Venice is?”

 

“…Italy?” Schuldig had no idea what Farfarello was going at and was now slightly amused by the guessing game. 

 

“Exactly. And what does Italy have?”

 

“You tell me.” Schuldig gave up.

 

“Nineteen volcanos.” Farfarello zipped the top of the carry-on and smirked. “And I’ve always been a practical person. Tolkien, remember? Your own words, if I may say so. A holiday and a mission all wrapped into one.”

 

 

THE END

 

Finished 2004-02-09

 

With thanks to Lex, Sidara, Bai Mei, and everyone else who endured my rambling while I was writing this beast. It’s now finished, and I move on to other monsters.


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